5 LLM Gateways Compared: Choosing the Right Infrastructure (2025)
The article discusses the emergence of LLM (Large Language Model) gateways as infrastructure for managing the growing complexity of LLM usage. It compares different gateway options based on factors like language, scalability, operational overhead, and user profiles.
Why it matters
As the use of LLMs becomes more widespread and critical to applications, the choice of the right gateway infrastructure becomes an important decision that can impact performance, scalability, and operational complexity.
Key Points
- 1LLM usage evolves from a simple library call to shared infrastructure as concerns like retries, observability, and cost management accumulate
- 2An LLM gateway can centralize routing, retries, observability, caching, and policy enforcement as LLM calls become critical to the system
- 3Key evaluation axes for LLM gateways include language/runtime, codebase complexity, scalability, operational overhead, and user profile
- 4LiteLLM is a feature-rich Python-based gateway suitable for experimentation and low-to-moderate traffic, but may struggle with predictable performance at scale
- 5Portkey focuses on stability and predictability over breadth of features, targeting production use cases with consistent high throughput and tight latency requirements
Details
The article explains how the shift to using LLMs as shared infrastructure, rather than simple library calls, leads to the need for gateways that can centralize concerns like routing, retries, observability, caching, and policy enforcement. It then outlines the key dimensions to evaluate LLM gateways, including language/runtime, codebase complexity, scalability, operational overhead, and user profile. The article then provides an in-depth comparison of two popular gateways - LiteLLM and Portkey. LiteLLM is a feature-rich Python-based gateway well-suited for experimentation and low-to-moderate traffic, but may struggle with predictable performance at scale due to Python's runtime characteristics. In contrast, Portkey focuses on stability and predictability over breadth of features, targeting production use cases that require consistent high throughput and tight latency requirements.
No comments yet
Be the first to comment