A practical look at routing, security inspection, and the one architecture decision that determines whether your LLM traffic stays yours
Most teams bolt an AI gateway onto their stack the same way they bolt on a load balancer. Stand it up, point traffic at it, move on. That works fine until someone asks which model handled a specific failed request last Tuesday, or whether a support prompt leaked a customer's phone number. If the gateway can't answer that, it isn't really a gateway. It's a pass-through with extra steps.
Here's what's actually going on under the hood, and why one design decision matters more than the rest combined.
The request path
An AI gateway sits between your app and whatever model providers you use. It's not a dumb proxy. It reads the payload, not just the headers. A request typically moves through five stages:
