Debby McKinney

Posted on Jan 8

This Open-Source LLM Gateway is 54x Faster Than LiteLLM (Here's Why)

#chatgpt #programming #ai #opensource

Introducing Bifrost: The Fastest Open-Source LLM Gateway Built for Production Scale

maximhq / bifrost

Fastest LLM gateway (50x faster than LiteLLM) with adaptive load balancer, cluster mode, guardrails, 1000+ models support & <100 µs overhead at 5k RPS.

Bifrost

The fastest way to build AI applications that never go down

Bifrost is a high-performance AI gateway that unifies access to 15+ providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, and more) through a single OpenAI-compatible API. Deploy in seconds with zero configuration and get automatic failover, load balancing, semantic caching, and enterprise-grade features.

Quick Start

Go from zero to production-ready AI gateway in under a minute.

Step 1: Start Bifrost Gateway

# Install and run locally
npx -y @maximhq/bifrost

# Or use Docker
docker run -p 8080:8080 maximhq/bifrost

Step 2: Configure via Web UI

# Open the built-in web interface
open http://localhost:8080

Step 3: Make your first API call

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "openai/gpt-4o-mini",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello, Bifrost!"}]
  }'

That's it! Your AI gateway is running with a web interface for visual configuration, real-time monitoring…

View on GitHub

The team at Maxim AI has built Bifrost, a blazing-fast LLM gateway designed to solve real production problems at scale.

What is Bifrost?

Bifrost is the fastest, fully open-source LLM gateway that takes less than 30 seconds to set up. Written in pure Go with production-grade architecture, it delivers exceptional performance optimized at every level. Bifrost provides unified access to 1000+ models across 15+ providers through a single OpenAI-compatible API.

Why It Was Built

The team at Maxim AI encountered a critical bottleneck when experimenting with multiple gateway solutions for production use cases: performance at scale. They weren't alone; fast-moving AI teams building production systems kept hitting the same pain points.

The problem? Most LLM gateways are built in Python. While Python excels at prototyping, serving thousands of requests per second in production reveals significant interpreted overhead that becomes a bottleneck. Teams needed flexibility and features, but not at the cost of latency that degrades user experience.

That's why Bifrost was built; a high-performance, fully self-hosted LLM gateway that delivers on all fronts.

Performance That Actually Matters

The numbers tell the story. Comprehensive benchmarks were run against LiteLLM (the most popular Python-based gateway) on identical hardware at 5,000 requests per second:

Head-to-Head: Bifrost vs LiteLLM

Metric	LiteLLM	Bifrost	Improvement
p99 Latency	90.72s	1.68s	54x faster
Throughput	44.84 req/sec	424 req/sec	9.4x higher
Memory Usage	372MB	120MB	3x lighter
Mean Overhead	~500µs	11µs @ 5K RPS	45x lower

The 11µs mean overhead at 5,000 RPS is particularly significant. This represents the time Bifrost adds to each request for routing, load balancing, logging, and observability. At this level, the gateway effectively disappears from latency budgets, making it ideal for latency-sensitive applications where every millisecond counts.

Key Features

1. Zero-Configuration Deployment

Getting started with Bifrost takes less than 30 seconds:

# Using NPX
npx -y @maximhq/bifrost

# Or with Docker
docker run -p 8080:8080 maximhq/bifrost

No YAML files. No complex configuration. The web UI provides visual configuration, real-time monitoring, and analytics out of the box. Teams can go from installation to production-ready gateway in under a minute.

2. Robust Governance

Bifrost implements enterprise-grade governance features designed for production deployments:

Virtual Keys: Create separate keys for different applications with independent budgets, rate limits, and access controls
Hierarchical Budgets: Set spending limits at customer, team, and application levels with real-time enforcement
Weighted Distribution: Efficiently rotate and manage API keys with configurable weights across multiple teams
Usage Tracking: Detailed cost attribution and consumption analytics across all dimensions
Rate Limiting: Fine-grained token and request throttling per team, key, or endpoint

3. Model Context Protocol (MCP) Integration

Bifrost includes built-in MCP support, enabling AI models to use external tools:

Tool Integration: Connect AI agents to filesystems, web search, databases, and custom APIs
Centralized Governance: Unified policy enforcement for all MCP tool connections
Security Controls: Granular permissions and authentication for tool access
Observable Tool Usage: Complete visibility into agent tool interactions
Agent Mode: Configurable autonomous tool execution with auto-approval settings

4. Plugin-First Architecture

Bifrost's extensible plugin system allows teams to customize behavior without forking:

No Callback Hell: Clean, simple addition and creation of custom plugins
Interface-Based Safety: Well-defined interfaces ensure type safety and compile-time validation
Zero-Copy Integration: Direct memory access to request/response objects minimizes performance overhead
Failure Isolation: Plugin errors don't crash the core system

5. Production-Ready Reliability

Bifrost ensures 99.99% uptime through intelligent routing and failover:

Automatic Failover: Seamless fallback to backup providers during throttling or outages
Adaptive Load Balancing: Intelligent request distribution based on provider health and performance
Health Monitoring: Continuous tracking of success rates, response times, and error patterns
Zero-Downtime Switching: Model and provider changes without service interruption

6. Advanced Optimization

Additional capabilities that reduce costs and improve performance:

Semantic Caching: Intelligent response caching based on semantic similarity reduces API costs by up to 40-60%
Multimodal Support: Unified handling of text, images, audio, and streaming
Observability: Native Prometheus metrics, distributed tracing, and comprehensive logging

Seamless Integration with Maxim Platform

While Bifrost works perfectly as a standalone gateway, it uniquely integrates with Maxim AI's comprehensive platform for end-to-end AI quality management:

Agent Simulation: Test AI agents across hundreds of scenarios before production deployment
Unified Evaluations: Combine automated and human evaluation frameworks
Production Observability: Real-time monitoring with automated quality checks
Data Curation: Continuously evolve datasets from production logs

This integration enables teams to ship AI agents reliably and 5x faster by unifying pre-release testing with production monitoring.

Who Should Use Bifrost?

Bifrost is designed for teams building production AI applications:

Startups needing fast deployment without infrastructure complexity
Scale-ups hitting performance bottlenecks with Python-based gateways
Enterprises requiring robust governance, compliance, and audit capabilities
AI Platform Teams building internal AI infrastructure for multiple products
Developer Tools Companies offering AI-powered features to customers

Getting Started

The fastest way to try Bifrost is through the instant deployment options:

# Deploy locally with NPX (no installation required)
npx -y @maximhq/bifrost

# Or use Docker
docker run -p 8080:8080 maximhq/bifrost

Once running, access the web UI at http://localhost:8080 to configure providers, set up virtual keys, and monitor requests in real-time.

For production deployments, Bifrost supports:

Docker Compose for simple multi-container setups
Kubernetes with Helm charts for enterprise deployments
Self-hosted VPC for complete data control and compliance

Open Source & Community

Bifrost is fully open-source under the Apache 2.0 license. The repository includes:

Complete source code with A+ code quality report
Comprehensive documentation and deployment guides
Benchmark suite for performance validation
Active community support and contribution guidelines

Check out Bifrost on GitHub to explore the code, run benchmarks, and join the community.

Try It Today

Stop wrestling with gateway performance issues. Bifrost provides production-grade LLM infrastructure with zero configuration overhead.

Deployment options:

GitHub Repository - Self-hosted deployment
Bifrost Documentation - Complete guides and API reference
Maxim AI Platform - Full-stack AI quality management

For teams needing comprehensive AI evaluation, simulation, and observability beyond the gateway, Maxim AI provides end-to-end platform capabilities that integrate seamlessly with Bifrost.

Building production AI applications? Share your infrastructure challenges in the comments