Enterprise LLM Gateway: Route, govern, and secure your AI traffic

This is a technical article, not a shipped product — worth flagging upfront. It walks through the architecture of an LLM gateway layer: routing requests across providers by cost or latency, enforcing rate limits, centralizing API key management, and building an audit trail for compliance teams. The framing is enterprise but the problems it describes start showing up well before you have an enterprise budget — the moment a SaaS team is paying three separate AI bills and has no idea which model is eating the margin. The article covers the conceptual layer well. The gap is that it stops short of recommending specific open-source implementations or comparing the handful of existing gateway projects by name, so the reader still has to do that research themselves. Treat it as a solid orientation read before evaluating tools like LiteLLM, Portkey, or rolling something custom. -> Best for: technical PM or AI engineer managing multi-provider LLM spend at a SaaS team of 2-5