LLM Gateways and Routing Infrastructure in Production: Comparing LiteLLM, Portkey, Kong AI Gateway, and Cloudflare AI Gateway
In early production architectures, engineering teams frequently integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) by instantiating vendor-specific SDK clients directly within application microservices. While this pattern enables rapid prototyping, it introduces severe architectural bottlenecks at scale: unmitigated upstream provider outages (HTTP 502/503 errors), strict rate limit exhaustion (HTTP 429), uncoordinated token spend across teams, absent audit logging, and tight coupling to proprietary API sche







