This post originally appeared on tokenjam.dev/blog . It's part of a 14-post series on the agentic AI ecosystem.

TL;DR

An LLM gateway is a unified API layer that abstracts away provider differences, sitting between your app and OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, or any other LLM provider.

Core functions: single API interface, key management, rate limiting, automatic fallbacks, retries, response caching, and observability of API traffic.

Teams adopt them to reduce vendor lock-in, control costs, swap models without code changes, and gain visibility into LLM usage.

Gateways and observability tools are converging, though they solve different problems: routing decisions vs.…