Evaluating AI Gateways: The Production Requirements That Actually Matter

The AI gateway market is crowded with seemingly identical products, but selection criteria should prioritize your actual deployment and compliance requirements over feature lists. Teams commonly overlook deployment flexibility—SaaS vs. self-hosted, multi-cloud support, and data residency—as a foundational filter, only realizing its importance too late. Understanding infrastructure constraints and regulatory requirements upfront, before evaluating routing or observability features, is the difference between a successful deployment and costly mistakes.