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# Philosophy

Today, generative AI is simply unavoidable. It’s transforming industries, unlocking new possibilities, and accelerating innovation at an unprecedented pace. However, this revolution comes with serious challenges—especially for large organizations. Without proper governance, it’s easy to fall into the trap of "shadow AI," where employees use unapproved tools, potentially leaking sensitive data and introducing security risks. Costs can spiral out of control, usage becomes opaque, and maintaining compliance becomes a nightmare. To harness the true power of GenAI, enterprises need to act fast and establish guardrails before chaos sets in.

The main idea behind the AI Gateway / LLM gateway is to use the Egress Proxy Pattern to allows organizations to securely route outgoing traffic from their infrastructure to external LLM providers while maintaining strict control over network access, security policies, and compliance requirements.

As any request going to a LLM Provider API pass through the LLM Gateway, you can decide who can do the call, when, to which provider, if you need to block the call based on it's content. The central position of the gateway is the key of this whole architecture, the key to control.

## Key Benefits​

- Security & Compliance: Enforce security policies and restrict outbound traffic to authorized destinations.
- Logging & Auditing: Monitor all outgoing requests for auditing and compliance.
- Performance Optimization: Cache responses where applicable to reduce redundant network calls and improve speed.
- Centralized Control: Manage API keys, access control, and provider selection centrally.

## How It Works​

- All outgoing requests to LLM providers pass through an Otoroshi instance before hitting the LLM provider.
- The proxy applies authentication, authorization, observability and audit before forwarding the request.
- Optionally, caching can be enabled for frequently accessed responses.
- The proxy integrates with Otoroshi’s key vault to manage LLM API tokens securely.