Comment by retrovrv

I'm affiliated with Portkey, so can answer who would need such a proxy/gateway:

Sidenote: Arch is def interesting!

A typical user we've seen at Portkey is a mid or a large size eng org where a central "Gen AI team" has now come up. This Gen AI team builds services that the rest of the company uses to build whatever AI features or products they want.

To build such a service, they need traditional API Gateway features like rate limiting, access rules, and also AI-specific features like universal API to multiple LLM providers, universal routing, central guardrails, AI-native observability + central dashboard for other stakeholders, and more.

It can absolutely be a plugin on top of existing Gateways.. like we've explored putting Portkey on Kong, but the need for a dedicated AI Gateway still remains, that can do all of these things I described in an easier way.

Probably, solutions like Langchain/Llamaindex etc. also fit in somewhere here, but a dedicated service for "ops" related issues for LLM APIs is something that we're seeing orgs adopt as a good practice.