GPT Load
GPT Load has become the go-to self-hosted AI gateway for teams managing multiple LLM provider credentials behind a single URL. The Go-built proxy transparently preserves native API formats for OpenAI Chat Completions, OpenAI Responses, Anthropic Messages, and Google Gemini — applications swap one base URL and keep their existing SDK integration untouched. Twenty built-in channels cover official APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI), cloud platforms (Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI), model services (DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, SiliconFlow, Zhipu AI, Alibaba Cloud, Volcengine, OpenRouter, Groq), and subscription accounts (Codex, Claude, Antigravity, Grok) using the same credential management, scheduling, and health system. The intelligent key pool rotates among valid credentials using atomic counters for fair high-concurrency distribution, automatically blacklists failing keys after configurable thresholds, and recovers them via scheduled health checks — all transparent to clients. Weighted load balancing distributes traffic across multiple upstream endpoints while per-credential proxies route individual keys through different egress paths. The Vue 3 management dashboard provides real-time statistics, group configuration, key testing, request logs with full debugging context, per-model cost estimates, and route inspection. Docker deployment exposes the management interface and proxy on port 3001 with SQLite by default, MySQL or PostgreSQL optional, and Redis for distributed leader-follower cluster scaling. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.
Apache APISIX
With 17,000 GitHub stars, 460+ contributors, and deployments across telecommunications, automotive, and financial services running on over 10,000 CPU cores at the largest known installations, Apache APISIX delivers a fully dynamic API gateway achieving 140,000 QPS on eight cores with sub-millisecond latency through NGINX's event-driven architecture and LuaJIT-compiled plugin execution. The 100+ open-source plugins cover authentication (JWT, OAuth 2.0, OIDC, Keycloak, LDAP), observability (Prometheus, Datadog, SkyWalking, OpenTelemetry), traffic management (rate limiting, circuit breaking, canary releases, traffic splitting), and security (CORS, IP restriction, CSRF protection) — all hot-reloadable without process restarts via etcd-based real-time configuration synchronization. Multi-protocol support handles HTTP, gRPC, MQTT, TCP, UDP, and WebSocket traffic for both north-south API access and east-west service mesh communication. AI gateway capabilities proxy requests to 20+ LLM providers with semantic caching, token-aware rate limiting, provider failover routing, and content moderation. Custom plugins extend the gateway in Lua, Go, Java, Python, or WebAssembly. Radixtree route matching handles 100,000+ routes without performance degradation. Functions as a Kubernetes ingress controller with native service discovery for Consul, Nacos, and Eureka. Deploy via Docker or Helm charts with horizontal scaling through etcd cluster coordination. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. Apache 2.0 licensed.
Kong
With over 43,000 GitHub stars and adoption by companies including Nasdaq, Samsung, and Expedia, Kong Gateway is the world's most deployed open-source API gateway, processing billions of API requests daily across hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud architectures. Built on the battle-tested NGINX engine with OpenResty's LuaJIT runtime, Kong delivers sub-millisecond proxy latency while supporting REST, gRPC, GraphQL, WebSocket, SOAP, and Kafka protocols. The plugin architecture includes authentication via JWT, Basic Auth, HMAC, key authentication, OAuth 2.0, and LDAP, alongside rate limiting with configurable windows per consumer, IP address, or API key. The AI Proxy plugin provides a universal LLM API that routes across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, AWS Bedrock, Azure AI, Databricks, Mistral, and Hugging Face through a single standardized interface, while MCP proxy capabilities convert REST APIs into MCP tools and provide traffic governance for AI agents. Kong supports declarative configuration via YAML for GitOps workflows, a RESTful Admin API for dynamic configuration, and decK CLI for version-controlled infrastructure-as-code management. Upstream health checking with active and passive probes enables automatic failover, and the ring balancer distributes traffic across upstream targets with consistent hashing, round-robin, or least-connections algorithms. The Kong Plugin Hub hosts over 100 community and official plugins covering logging, monitoring, transformation, security, and traffic control. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. Apache 2.0 licensed.
KrakenD
KrakenD processes over 18,000 requests per second on a single instance while consuming under 50MB of RAM at 1,000 concurrent connections, operating as a stateless API gateway that requires no database whatsoever. The Community Edition has earned over 2,600 GitHub stars by outperforming database-dependent alternatives like Kong and Tyk in independent benchmarks. Written entirely in Go, it uses declarative JSON or YAML configuration files that integrate directly into GitOps workflows for version-controlled infrastructure management. The gateway aggregates responses from multiple backend services into a single API call, transforms request and response payloads with field filtering, grouping, and mapping, and applies zero-trust security policies including JWT validation, OAuth 2.0, CORS, HSTS, clickjacking protection, and XSS prevention. Traffic management features include multi-layer rate limiting at both the router and proxy levels, circuit breakers for backend fault isolation, spike arrest policies, and concurrent call support that requests the same data from multiple backends in parallel for improved response times. Telemetry integrates with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana dashboards, Datadog, Zipkin, and Jaeger for distributed tracing and metrics collection. The gateway extends through Go plugins, Lua scripting, Martian modifiers, and Google CEL expressions for custom request processing logic. AI workload routing supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and other model endpoints with built-in fallback, retries, and load balancing. Deploy via Docker with the devopsfaith/krakend image as a single binary. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. Apache 2.0 licensed.