LLM Gateway: What It Is, Where It Sits, and What It Has to Enforce
An LLM gateway is a specialized proxy that sits between applications and LLM provider APIs. It handles model routing, rate limiting, retries, fallbacks, prompt classification, identity-aware policy enforcement, and audit logging. The category has split along two lines: traffic-management gateways that optimize cost and latency, and policy-enforcement gateways that operate as the compliance layer. The piece walks through what an LLM gateway is, where it sits architecturally, and what an enforcement-grade gateway has to produce.