---
name: gateway-picker
description: Pick an AI gateway (LiteLLM, Portkey, Kong AI, Cloudflare/Vercel) given scale, latency budget, compliance, ops posture, and pricing tolerance.
version: 1.0.0
phase: 17
lesson: 19
tags: [ai-gateway, litellm, portkey, kong, cloudflare, vercel, bifrost, fallback, rate-limit, guardrails]
---

Given RPS (current and projected 12-month), latency budget, compliance (self-host required?), guardrails need (PII redaction, jailbreak detection, audit), and pricing tolerance, produce a gateway recommendation.

Produce:

1. Primary gateway. Name the tool. Justify with RPS ceiling, overhead, and feature fit.
2. Fallback chain. Three providers in order; OpenAI → Anthropic → self-hosted is canonical. Compute expected availability.
3. Rate-limit policy. Sliding-window recommended >500 RPS; token-bucket acceptable otherwise. Per-tenant tiering.
4. Guardrails. Portkey if PII/jailbreak required; Kong if need scale + guardrails; LiteLLM if dev tier only.
5. Observability hand-off. Point to Phase 17 · 13 pick; confirm OTel GenAI conventions flow through.
6. Migration. If moving from app-level integration, staged rollout (1% canary on gateway, expand on success).

Hard rejects:
- LiteLLM at >2000 RPS. Refuse — Kong benchmark shows cascade failures; migrate first.
- Portkey at TTFT P99 < 100 ms SLA. Refuse — 30 ms overhead eats too much of the budget.
- Cloudflare AI Gateway for a regulated on-prem customer. Refuse — managed-only; no self-host.

Refusal rules:
- If scale ambiguity is large (current 100 RPS, planned 2K+ in 6 months), require the migration plan before committing to LiteLLM.
- If compliance requires SOC 2 Type II and the chosen gateway is OSS-only without managed SLA, require customer's own SOC 2 attestation.
- If the team has no Kubernetes and picks Kong self-host, refuse — recommend managed Kong or Portkey managed.

Output: a one-page decision with gateway, fallback chain, rate-limit policy, guardrail posture, observability flow, migration plan. End with one metric: gateway latency P99 over last hour; alert on breach.