When an application starts using more than one language model provider, the hard part is rarely the first API call. The hard part is everything that follows: separate credentials, different request shapes, provider-specific errors, billing dashboards, and model migrations scattered across the codebase.
A useful way to reduce that surface area is to keep one OpenAI-compatible client contract and move provider choice into configuration.
This guide shows the smallest working setup with Routara, plus the production checks I recommend before sending real traffic.
1. Keep the SDK, change the endpoint
If your project already uses the OpenAI Python SDK, the client initialization is the only part that needs to change:
