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An introduction to Envoy AI Gateway

14 min readOct 8, 2025

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Original article: https://blog.realvarez.com/blog/envoy-ai-gateway/

Organizations deploying AI applications face a fundamental challenge: no single model serves all needs. The reality is that developers within a company may prefer Claude for long-context analysis, OpenAI for reasoning tasks, and Llama for cost-sensitive workloads. The problem is that each model provider uses different APIs. Without centralized control, teams can’t easily switch providers, get visibility into utilization, or enforce quotas.

Envoy AI Gateway (EAIG) is an open source project that solves this challenge by providing a single, scalable OpenAI-compatible endpoint that routes to any provider. It gives Platform teams cost controls and observability, while developers never touch provider-specific SDKs.

Built on top of Envoy Gateway, EAIG is specifically designed for handling LLM traffic. It acts as a centralized access point for managing and controlling access to various AI models within an organization.

When using EAIG, your applications call a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint. It acts as proxy between the developer using the model and the model provider. It is an abstraction that enables you to switch from Bedrock Claude to Bedrock Llama to self-hosted models to OpenAI, all without touching application code.

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Envoy provides a unified gateway for consuming LLMs from different LLM providers

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Re Alvarez Parmar
Re Alvarez Parmar

Written by Re Alvarez Parmar

I am reader, writer, architect, and father of three. I write about Cloud, Kubernetes, containers, productivity, and psychology. Opinions expressed are my own.