LLM routing techniques for high-volume applications
Blog post from Portkey
High-volume AI applications benefit from advanced LLM routing techniques, which provide a dynamic control layer that adapts to real-time fluctuations in traffic, latency, cost, and provider performance. Unlike static model selection, routing evaluates each request against current conditions to choose the most suitable model, helping to mitigate issues like unpredictable latency, rate limits, cost instability, and provider degradation. These techniques include latency-based, cost-based, region-aware, semantic, metadata-based, load-based, fallback, and canary routing, each addressing specific challenges encountered at scale. Effective routing relies on continuous observability to ensure decisions are accurate and cost-effective, requiring visibility into latency, error rates, token usage, and model performance. Portkey's AI Gateway offers a comprehensive solution by integrating these routing techniques into a unified system, providing multi-provider support, dynamic per-request routing, performance protection, and end-to-end observability, making it an ideal choice for teams looking to implement intelligent LLM routing without developing their own infrastructure.