The Envoy-based AI Gateway moved to a new foundation with a new name to appeal to developers who experiment with AI as well as platform teams who need to govern it
I know I've picked a timely project to write about when it changes name and foundation because it's clear that the audience that's crying out for a tool like this won't find it easily enough in its original home - and the things it can do are what I hear a lot of teams asking for, so they'll want to hear about it.
when I was writing about the rather urgent move from Ingress NGNX to Gateway API solutions earlier this year, David Wang at Tetrate told me some platforms were seeing more traffic from agents than almost anything else and Envoy had a plan for that.
The plan now has a new name, Agent Router, and a new home at AAIF because while infrastructure teams care about networking and Envoy, developers care about different things and they're still largely the ones driving AI adoption so an AI gateway needs to work for both groups
This is a crowded space; Agent Router isn't even the only AI gateway in the AAIF. But it's the one built on Envoy, already in production at scale, at Bloomberg and elsewhere and it's extensible with plugins. Will that repeat Envoy's decade of success?
I talked to a lot of people for this one; alas, I can't find them on Bluesky to tag!
control plane
data plane
AI gateway
developer experience
model endpoints
model routing
fine grained authorisation
finops and cost control
governance and policy
open source foundations