The Inference Gateway Pattern: Why Every Production AI Team Builds the Same Middleware
· 8 min read
Every team shipping LLM-powered features goes through the same arc. First, you hardcode an OpenAI API call. Then you add a retry loop. Then someone asks how much you're spending. Then a provider goes down on a Friday afternoon, and suddenly you're building a gateway.
This isn't accidental. The inference gateway is an emergent architectural pattern — a middleware layer between your application and LLM providers that consolidates rate limiting, failover, cost tracking, prompt logging, and routing into a single chokepoint. It's the load balancer of the AI era, and if you're running models in production, you either have one or you're building one without realizing it.
