ArchitectureIntermediate
What is an AI Gateway? Architecture, Routing & Failover
Direct Answer & Overview
An AI Gateway is a specialized reverse proxy and orchestration layer that sits between client applications and downstream AI model providers to manage routing, rate limiting, automated failover, telemetry, and zero-retention privacy.
1.Why Production Systems Require an AI Gateway
Direct integration with individual AI model vendors creates brittle architectures vulnerable to provider outages, sudden rate-limit throttling (HTTP 429), and vendor lock-in. An AI gateway decouples your business logic from upstream AI infrastructure, giving engineering teams central control over model fallbacks, latency optimization, and credit allocation.
2.Core Architecture of the API100 Gateway
The API100 gateway is engineered for sub-50ms proxy overhead. Key components include:
• Ephemeral Ingestion: Requests are parsed in volatile RAM without disk writes.
• Circuit Breakers: Automatic health checks monitor upstream provider latency and error spikes.
• Intelligent Failover: If an upstream provider returns 5xx or 429 status codes, the gateway transparently reroutes the prompt to an alternate provider.
• Streaming Passthrough: Server-Sent Events (SSE) are relayed chunk-by-chunk to eliminate buffering delays.
3.Zero-Retention Privacy Guarantee
Enterprise compliance requires strict guarantees that proprietary code, customer queries, and healthcare information are not retained. API100 operates a zero-retention policy: prompts are never logged to persistent databases or used for upstream training.
Testing Gateway Routing with cURLbash
curl https://api.apihundred.com/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $API100_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "gpt-4o",
"messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello via Gateway!"}],
"stream": true
}'Frequently Asked Questions
What is an AI Gateway?
An AI Gateway is a cloud infrastructure proxy that manages, routes, and optimizes requests sent from applications to artificial intelligence foundation models with unified billing and automatic failover.
How does an AI gateway handle provider outages?
When an upstream provider experiences downtime, the gateway's circuit breaker detects failures and automatically routes the request to a redundant model or fallback provider with zero downtime to the client application.
A100
API100 Engineering Team
Infrastructure & Latency Research