Cut Costs, Boost Speed: The AI Proxy Revolution for Developers

The AI Proxy Revolution has changed the way developers operate, helping save money and speed up development. This new approach improves how systems talk to each other and allows for quicker, more efficient data exchange.

Modern software development is regularly burdened with challenges around costs and efficiency. Operational costs can skyrocket. Long development cycles slow time to market for products and can hamper flexibility. Kong's AI Proxy plugin provides a smart solution to these issues. It helps developers create and launch applications quicker and at a lower cost than before.

Introducing the AI Proxy plugin

Kong AI Gateway is a series of plugins that turn every Kong Gateway deployment into an AI gateway. With AI Gateway, you can deploy AI infrastructure for traffic being sent to LLMs, which lets you semantically route, secure, observe, accelerate, and govern using a special set of AI plugins — including Kong's AI Proxy plugin, a smart tool that works well with API gateway and service mesh setups. 

Kong's AI Proxy plugin allows users to transform and proxy requests to multiple AI providers and models. It allows for requests in a few standardized formats, translates them to the configured target format, and then transforms the response back into a standard format.

These plugins enable upstream connectivity to the LLMs and direct Kong Gateway to proxy traffic to the intended LLM models. With these plugins installed and AI traffic being proxied, you can use any of the 100+ Kong Gateway plugins to add enhanced capabilities, to improve security and performance and lower costs and speed up development times.

Want to see how Kong can slash your API costs? Check out our fintech case study to see how GCash cut monthly infrastructure costs by $70,000 a month and accelerated developer learning. 

Real-world implementation: A developer's perspective

To truly understand the power of AI proxy technology, consider a practical demonstration of it in action via Kong from a developer's perspective.

Simplifying AI integration

Developers can now simplify AI integration by creating a single egress point for multiple AI models, whether cloud-hosted or self-hosted. This approach allows for seamless switching between providers without modifying the underlying codebase. 

By configuring credentials, observability metrics, and routing rules in one centralized location, teams can reduce complexity and increase flexibility in AI application development.

Increased visibility

Beyond simplifying integration, the AI proxy offers robust observability and governance capabilities. Developers and architects can now gain comprehensive insights into AI traffic, tracking critical metrics such as latency, token usage, and model providers through integrated logging and monitoring solutions. 

This level of visibility enables organizations to create internal AI services, control AI infrastructure more effectively, and optimize resource allocation. With everything from credential management to traffic routing handled through a single, standardized interface, development teams can focus more on innovation and less on infrastructure management.

Cost-effective development with AI proxy

Let's zoom out and take a look at some of the different things AI proxy technology can do to help organizations save money and operate more cost-effectively thanks to a few key features.

Intelligent traffic management

Traffic management reduces unnecessary steps and API calls, helping to lower costs for hosting and bandwidth. When data flows more efficiently, businesses can save their infrastructure costs. 

AI proxies also offer powerful features that play a role in lowering risks and minimizing potential security issues. This can save money that would be spent on fixing problems after they occur — and (bonus) creates trust with customers, who can rest assured their data is safe and private. Speaking of security . . .

Fine-grained API security

Strong security controls offer protection from many threats. An AI proxy can check each API request and use security policies based on who the user is, how sensitive the data is, and the context of the request. This careful approach ensures that only approved requests pass through and reduces the chance of unauthorized access and data leaks.

This fine-grained approach to security helps businesses adhere to industry rules and standards and can improve data protection and compliance. The AI proxy's specific access control also prevents unauthorized use. This helps cut down on risks and costs related to security issues and can help businesses avoid expensive data breaches and compliance problems.

Scaling with centralized governance

AI proxy technology can help scale the usage of AI-based solutions in an organization by offering a centralized place of governance. Developers can then confidently use AI capabilities offered by LLMs.

Accelerating development speed

AI proxy technology offers big speed improvements. It can handle complex tasks such as routing, rate limiting, and authentication. Smart automation of infrastructure and scaling saves time by taking away the need for manual changes. Plus, intelligent caching makes responses faster for regular requests.

These attributes help companies cut development time by months; APIs that used to take weeks to build may now be completed in days. By freeing development teams to spend less time on simple tasks they can concentrate more on things more likely to move the needle, like new ideas and features for customers.

Priceless benefits: Scaling security

As discussed some of the main benefits of the AI proxy technology are cost and speed. It also offers value in other ways. These ways include security and scalability.

The AI proxy can look at who can use each microservice, allowing for detailed control. It also scans traffic automatically to find common threats and issues.

The AI proxy is built to scale fast. It can find and handle many services at the same time. It also works well with Kubernetes and service mesh so it can adapt easily when needs change.

The future of development with AI proxy

AI proxy technology hints at a future where smart and automated API systems run everything. 

As the API economy grows and gets more advanced, tools like AI proxies are becoming increasingly important. They help companies join the API ecosystem and manage costs while lowering development issues.

With AI Gateway, Kong gives developers and companies an improved way to work on API development. It helps them save money and finish their digital projects faster. With this tool, development teams can build advanced applications and services more quickly and easily and operations can be simplified.

The way we develop software is changing. Intelligence, automation, and speed are now at the center of how we must operate moving forward. Kong AI Gateway and the AI proxy plugin help make development faster and cheaper.