How to choose an AI gateway

The AI gateway is becoming the control point of enterprise AI: every model request passes through it, so observability, cost attribution, guardrails, and access control all live there. The market has converged on a handful of serious options. The right one is determined less by feature lists than by the shape of your existing estate.

Start from your estate, not the feature list

Gateways are infrastructure, and infrastructure choices follow gravity. A Databricks-heavy organization will find Unity AI Gateway integrates naturally with the governance it already runs. A Snowflake-centric one keeps AI close to governed data with Cortex. An AWS-committed shop gets IAM-native control from Bedrock. Heterogeneous or self-hosted estates tend toward Kong or LiteLLM, which sit above any provider.

Six criteria that actually differentiate

• Deployment model: SaaS, self-hosted, or in your VPC. This decides whether sensitive data ever leaves your environment.
• Provider coverage: cloud APIs and self-hosted models, not just the big three.
• Attribution granularity: can every request carry team, application, and user identity?
• Guardrail depth: PII handling, model allow-lists, request and response policies.
• Telemetry export: does usage flow into the observability platform you already run?
• Exit cost: how portable are your routes, policies, and budgets if you switch?

Field notes from implementations

• Kong: strong where an API gateway estate already exists; AI traffic joins governed API traffic.
• LiteLLM: fastest to stand up and very flexible, but you own the operations.
• Unity AI Gateway: the natural choice inside Databricks estates; governance ties into the platform.
• Snowflake Cortex: keeps AI adjacent to data already governed in Snowflake.
• Amazon Bedrock: deep AWS integration; access control speaks IAM natively.

The uncomfortable truth

A well-governed deployment of any of these beats an ungoverned deployment of the best one. Sequencing matters more than selection: get observability first, then attribution, then policy. If you are choosing a gateway before you can say who uses which models today, you are choosing blind.

Goverent implements all five stacks and starts every engagement with an assessment of your current environment. [email protected]