Introduction to AI Gateways

Overview

Introduction to AI Gateways explores the conceptual and practical foundations of AI gateways. In this intensive two-day, hands-on course, attendees will learn the hows and whys of routing, securing, and governing AI traffic in modern systems. The course focuses on the core responsibilities of AI gateways—model routing, cost and performance control, safety enforcement, and policy-driven decision making—grounded in real-world usage and implementation patterns.

Participants will learn how AI gateways compare to and differ from traditional infrastructure components such as API gateways, proxies, and service meshes, with an emphasis on practical tradeoffs and best practices.

Day one introduces the AI gateway landscape and core concerns, including gateway roles, routing strategies, pricing and performance considerations, and safety fundamentals. Attendees will work with OpenRouter to explore multi-provider routing and abstraction in practice.

Day two focuses on security, policy-based controls, and enforcement. Participants will examine how policies are evaluated and enforced at runtime, how gateways provide observability into decisions, and how failures are handled. The course concludes with hands-on use of LiteLLM to connect policy concepts to a concrete gateway implementation.

Upon completion, attendees will have a clear mental model of AI gateways and be prepared to evaluate or deploy them with confidence.

Duration

2 Days