Tetrate Agent Router: Frequently Asked Questions

You change one line. The base URL changes from your provider's endpoint to Agent Router — everything else in your code stays the same, because the API is OpenAI-compatible.

Agent Router is OpenAI-compatible and provider-neutral, with support across major LLM providers including xAI (Grok), Groq, DeepInfra, and open-weight models, alongside the major commercial providers. You can route across providers and configure automatic failover between them.

Yes. Agent Router includes a native MCP gateway that gives agents governed access to tools through curated MCP catalogs, with per-profile authentication and tool filtering set centrally by admins.

Yes. BYOK is live — you can use your own provider credentials and switch between Tetrate-managed keys and your own keys.

Agent Router provides in-app integration guides for popular AI coding assistants and agent frameworks, including Aider, Cline, Roo Code, and Goose. Because it is OpenAI-compatible, it also works with any framework that targets an OpenAI-style endpoint.

Yes, with Agent Router Enterprise. Enterprise runs as a dedicated instance with a distributed data-plane model: you can deploy data planes in your own AWS, Azure, or GCP VPC, on-premises, at the edge, or per-region — all governed from a single Tetrate-managed control plane.

Agent Router Service is the self-serve, developer-focused tier — sign up and start routing through a Tetrate-managed service in minutes. Agent Router Enterprise includes everything in Service, plus cross-team cost attribution with showback and chargeback, admin controls for model and MCP access profiles by team, runtime AI Guardrails, and enterprise SSO where every request carries authenticated identity — all in a dedicated instance.

The AI Gateway is Agent Router's model-routing component: an approved model catalog, unified provider access, and automatic failover. (You may see it called the "LLM Gateway" in some older materials — it is the same component, now standardized as the AI Gateway.)

Its capabilities are now part of Agent Router Enterprise. The runtime visibility, governance, and policy-enforcement features formerly delivered as Agent Operations Director are now included in Agent Router Enterprise.

Envoy AI Gateway is the open-source data plane. Tetrate Agent Router is the productized, managed, and governed product built on top of it — by the team that co-created and maintains the project. See the full comparison: Tetrate Agent Router vs. self-hosting Envoy AI Gateway.

These are Tetrate's application-networking line, distinct from the AI products. Tetrate Enterprise Gateway for Envoy (TEG) is a hardened Kubernetes ingress built on Envoy Gateway. Tetrate Istio Subscription (TIS) provides enterprise support for upstream Istio and Envoy. Tetrate Service Bridge (TSB) is an Istio-based service mesh management plane. Agent Router is the AI gateway, built on Envoy AI Gateway.

Yes. Both expose an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, but Agent Router is built on Envoy for production scale, with cost attribution, guardrails, and audit. See Tetrate Agent Router vs. LiteLLM.

Yes — and notably an independent one, since Portkey was acquired by Palo Alto Networks and is now part of Prisma AIRS. See Tetrate Agent Router vs. Portkey.

Yes. Kong extends its API-management platform to AI via plugins; Agent Router is AI-native on Envoy AI Gateway. See Tetrate Agent Router vs. Kong AI Gateway.

See the head-to-heads: vs. Bifrost and vs. Cloudflare AI Gateway, or the full landscape in Best Enterprise AI Gateways 2026.

Envoy AI Gateway was co-created by Tetrate and Bloomberg, first announced in October 2024 and released as v0.1 in February 2025. It is the first open-source AI gateway project backed by the CNCF. See Who created Envoy AI Gateway?

Tetrate is a founding maintainer and maintains the project today, alongside Bloomberg and the broader Envoy community. Tetrate is also a driving force behind Envoy itself.

Yes — it is the first open-source AI gateway project backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, built as an extension of Envoy Proxy and Envoy Gateway.

For MCP tool calls, published benchmarks show overhead that is negligible relative to multi-second LLM reasoning time. See the methodology and figures on the AI Gateway benchmarks page.

Agent Router is built on Envoy Proxy, designed for efficient concurrent request handling, giving it a more deterministic memory profile and improved stability under sustained load than Python-based proxies. See the benchmarks page for details.

Agent Router Service is usage-based (pay-as-you-go) — you can sign up with a GitHub or Google account and start immediately. For Agent Router Enterprise pricing, contact us to request a meeting.

Yes. You can sign up for Agent Router Service and start using it right away, with free credit to get started. Start building.

Sign up for Agent Router Service with a GitHub or Google account, point your base URL at Agent Router, and start routing. For Enterprise, book a demo.

Tetrate maintains SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications and is GDPR compliant. Full details, including the Trust Center, are on the Trust & Security page.

All data is encrypted in transit using TLS 1.3 and at rest using AES-256, with end-to-end encryption for sensitive communications. See the Trust & Security page for the full security practices.

Agent Router Enterprise includes runtime AI Guardrails that perform PII detection and redaction on every request and response, along with prompt filtering and policy enforcement, before requests leave your network. Tetrate also follows data-minimization practices, collecting only the data necessary to provide the service.

Yes. With Agent Router Enterprise's distributed data-plane model, you control where each data plane runs — your own cloud VPC, on-premises, at the edge, or per-region — so AI traffic stays where your requirements demand. Tetrate respects data residency requirements and regulations.

With Agent Router Enterprise, yes — enterprise SSO with MFA means every request carries authenticated user and team identity, enforced through role-based access controls and least-privilege principles. This is what enables per-team attribution and audit.

Tetrate runs 24/7 security monitoring with SIEM-based threat detection, regular penetration testing and vulnerability scanning, and established incident-response procedures with defined SLAs. See the Trust & Security page for details.