DEV Community: Deepti Shukla

Best AWS Bedrock Alternatives for Multi-Cloud Teams in 2026

Deepti Shukla — Wed, 20 May 2026 11:01:57 +0000

The Multi-Cloud Reality of Enterprise AI

Enterprise AI infrastructure in 2026 rarely lives on a single cloud. Organizations adopt multi-cloud architectures for reasons that are strategic rather than technical: avoiding vendor lock-in, leveraging best-of-breed services across providers, meeting data residency requirements across regions, and maintaining negotiating leverage on cloud pricing. According to industry research, the majority of large enterprises operate workloads across two or more cloud providers.

AWS Bedrock serves a valuable purpose within the AWS ecosystem. It provides managed, serverless access to foundation models from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, Cohere, and Amazon, with native integration into IAM, CloudTrail, and VPC networking. For all-in AWS organizations, the operational simplicity is compelling: you get model access without managing inference infrastructure, with compliance certifications inherited from the broader AWS platform.

But Bedrock's design assumptions break down in multi-cloud environments. The model catalog is curated by AWS rather than comprehensive. Models from providers not partnered with Bedrock are unavailable, and new models often appear on Bedrock weeks or months after their general release. Routing is limited to a single model family per request, with no cross-provider failover or load balancing. Cost management is handled through AWS billing rather than token-level controls, making team-level attribution and budget enforcement difficult without custom engineering. Guardrails are available but scoped to Bedrock models. And most critically, Bedrock only runs on AWS. If your organization also operates on GCP, Azure, or on-premise infrastructure, you need separate AI access layers for each environment, with separate governance, separate observability, and separate cost tracking.

This fragmentation is the core problem that multi-cloud AI teams face. Here are the alternatives that solve it.

1. TrueFoundry AI Gateway

Best for: Multi-cloud enterprises that need a single AI gateway across AWS, GCP, Azure, and on-premise with unified governance

TrueFoundry is the strongest Bedrock alternative for multi-cloud teams because it provides a cloud-agnostic AI gateway that unifies model access, governance, and observability across every environment. Whether you are routing to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, AWS Bedrock itself, Azure OpenAI, or self-hosted open-source models running on any cloud, TrueFoundry provides a single control plane with consistent policies and a unified view of all AI traffic.

The architectural advantage over Bedrock is provider independence. TrueFoundry connects to 250+ models across every major provider through a single OpenAI-compatible API. Applications write against one interface and can switch between models, including Bedrock-hosted models, without code changes. Virtual models enable weighted load balancing across providers on different clouds, automatic failover when any provider experiences issues, and latency-based routing to the fastest available endpoint regardless of which cloud it runs on.

For multi-cloud deployments, TrueFoundry's gateway can be deployed on any Kubernetes cluster: EKS on AWS, GKE on GCP, AKS on Azure, or on-premise infrastructure. A single gateway deployment can route to models on any cloud, or you can deploy gateway instances in each environment with centralized policy management. Either way, governance, observability, and cost tracking are unified rather than fragmented across cloud-specific billing systems.

Cost management is a significant differentiator for multi-cloud teams. Where Bedrock costs appear as line items in AWS billing that must be manually correlated with other cloud AI spending, TrueFoundry tracks costs per request across all providers with attribution to teams, projects, and environments. Budget limits enforce spending caps that span clouds: a team's AI budget applies whether they are calling a model on AWS, GCP, or Azure. Semantic and exact-match caching reduces token consumption across all providers.

The guardrail suite applies consistently regardless of which model or cloud is handling a request. PII detection, prompt injection defense, content moderation, and custom policy enforcement operate at the gateway layer, ensuring that the same safety standards govern all AI traffic across your multi-cloud infrastructure.

The MCP Gateway provides centralized tool governance for agentic workflows that span cloud environments, with consistent authentication, authorization, and audit logging whether tools run on AWS, GCP, or on-premise systems.

Explore TrueFoundry for multi-cloud AI →

2. Azure AI Foundry

Best for: Organizations splitting workloads between AWS and Azure that want a managed AI layer on the Azure side

Azure AI Foundry provides managed model access within the Azure ecosystem, playing a role analogous to Bedrock on the Azure side. For organizations running a dual-cloud architecture with workloads on both AWS and Azure, using Bedrock on AWS and Azure AI Foundry on Azure provides managed model access on each cloud.

Azure AI Foundry offers access to OpenAI models, Microsoft's own models, and a growing catalog of third-party models. Integration with Azure Content Safety, Azure Active Directory, and Azure Monitor provides guardrails, access control, and observability within the Azure environment. The compliance certification coverage is extensive for regulated industries.

The limitation for multi-cloud teams is that this approach doubles the management overhead. You have two separate AI access layers, two separate billing systems, two separate governance configurations, and two separate observability dashboards. Cost attribution across clouds requires manual aggregation. Policy consistency requires parallel configuration. A cloud-agnostic gateway like TrueFoundry eliminates this duplication.

3. Google Vertex AI

Best for: GCP-focused teams that need managed model access with strong data residency controls

Google Vertex AI provides access to Google's Gemini family and select third-party models within the GCP ecosystem. Data residency controls are particularly strong, allowing organizations to specify inference locations down to individual GCP regions. Integration with Google IAM, Cloud Logging, and Model Armor provides access control, observability, and content safety.

For multi-cloud teams, Vertex AI covers the GCP portion of the AI workload with managed simplicity. The same duplication concern applies: using Vertex AI on GCP, Bedrock on AWS, and Azure AI Foundry on Azure creates three separate management planes. The model catalog on each cloud is different, governance policies must be configured independently, and cost visibility is fragmented across three billing systems.

4. Self-Hosted Open-Source Models

Best for: Teams that want total cloud independence for inference with no provider lock-in

Running open-source models on your own infrastructure, using inference engines like vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM, provides complete cloud independence. You choose the hardware, the cloud provider (or no cloud at all), the model, and the serving configuration. There is no catalog restriction, no provider partnership dependency, and no per-token API pricing beyond your infrastructure costs.

The trade-off is operational burden. You manage GPU procurement, model deployment, autoscaling, monitoring, and maintenance. You do not have access to the most capable proprietary models unless you combine self-hosted inference with commercial API access. However, open-source model quality has improved dramatically in 2026, with models like Llama, Mistral, and Qwen approaching proprietary model capabilities for many tasks. For organizations with strong GPU operations teams, self-hosted models provide the most flexible and potentially most cost-effective inference at scale.

TrueFoundry supports self-hosted model deployment natively, providing containerized deployment with GPU scheduling, autoscaling, and model caching on any Kubernetes cluster. Self-hosted models integrate into the same gateway, governance, and observability infrastructure as commercial API models, creating a unified control plane across self-hosted and API-based inference. This hybrid approach is particularly powerful for multi-cloud teams: route sensitive workloads to self-hosted models while directing other tasks to whichever cloud provider offers the best model for that specific use case.

5. Multi-Provider Direct Integration

Best for: Engineering teams with the capacity to build and maintain custom provider integrations

Some organizations choose to integrate directly with each model provider's API, building custom routing, failover, and cost tracking in application code. This approach provides maximum control over each provider interaction and avoids any gateway overhead.

The advantage is zero middleware dependency. The disadvantage is significant engineering investment that grows with each new provider, model, or team. Direct integration means each application independently handles authentication, error handling, retry logic, and cost tracking for each provider. Governance, guardrails, and observability must be implemented per-application rather than centrally. As the number of models, teams, and applications grows, the maintenance burden scales proportionally.

For small teams with one or two applications calling one or two providers, direct integration can be simpler than adopting a gateway. For enterprise-scale deployments with dozens of teams and hundreds of applications across multiple clouds, the centralized governance and unified observability that a gateway provides becomes essential.

The Multi-Cloud AI Architecture Decision

The fundamental question for multi-cloud AI teams is whether to manage AI access separately on each cloud or unify it through a cloud-agnostic layer.

The per-cloud approach, using Bedrock on AWS, Azure AI Foundry on Azure, and Vertex AI on GCP, provides managed simplicity within each environment but creates fragmented governance, duplicated configuration, and siloed cost visibility. For organizations where each cloud serves genuinely independent business units with no shared AI governance requirements, this approach can work.

The unified approach, routing all AI traffic through a cloud-agnostic gateway like TrueFoundry, provides consistent governance, unified cost tracking, and centralized observability regardless of where models run. The trade-off is an additional infrastructure component to deploy and manage. For organizations that need cross-cloud AI governance, unified cost attribution, and consistent security policies, the gateway approach eliminates the fragmentation that per-cloud solutions create.

Most multi-cloud enterprises in 2026 are discovering that the operational overhead of managing three separate AI access layers, each with its own governance model, billing system, and observability stack, exceeds the overhead of deploying a single, cloud-agnostic AI gateway that unifies everything. The gateway becomes the AI control plane, and the individual cloud providers become interchangeable compute backends.

TrueFoundry is purpose-built for this architectural pattern. It provides a single gateway that routes to models on any cloud, enforces consistent governance policies across environments, tracks costs with cross-cloud attribution, and supports both commercial API models and self-hosted inference through the same control plane. For multi-cloud enterprises, this unified approach eliminates the fragmentation that per-cloud solutions create while preserving the flexibility to use the best model for each workload regardless of where it runs.

The choice between per-cloud and unified approaches ultimately comes down to organizational structure. If each business unit independently manages its own cloud and AI stack, per-cloud solutions align with that autonomy. If AI governance, cost management, and security policies need to be consistent across the organization, a cloud-agnostic gateway is the architecture that enforces that consistency without requiring manual coordination across cloud teams.

Best OpenRouter Alternatives for Regulated Industries in 2026

Deepti Shukla — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:26:50 +0000

Why Regulated Industries Cannot Rely on Public Model Aggregators

OpenRouter solved a real problem for the developer community. It provides a single API endpoint to access hundreds of models from dozens of providers, with transparent per-token pricing and automatic billing aggregation. For prototyping, experimentation, and small-scale production, the convenience is significant. You get one API key, one billing relationship, and access to every major model without managing individual provider accounts.

For regulated industries, that convenience creates compliance risk. Healthcare organizations operating under HIPAA, financial institutions subject to SOX and PCI-DSS, and government agencies bound by FedRAMP and ITAR face strict requirements around data handling that a public aggregator model fundamentally cannot satisfy.

The first issue is data sovereignty. When you route requests through OpenRouter, your prompts and completions traverse a third-party infrastructure layer before reaching the model provider. For organizations handling protected health information, financial data, or classified content, this additional data hop introduces compliance exposure. Even if OpenRouter does not log content, the architectural reality of routing sensitive data through a third party's infrastructure creates a finding in most compliance audits. The data flow itself, not just the storage, matters to auditors.

The second issue is auditability. Regulated environments require immutable audit trails that prove which user accessed which model with what data at what time, and what guardrails were applied. OpenRouter provides usage tracking and cost analytics, but the depth and format of its logs may not satisfy the evidence requirements of SOC 2, HIPAA, or ISO 27001 audits. Compliance teams need logs they control, stored in systems they own, with retention policies they define, and the ability to export to their SIEM or data lake infrastructure.

The third issue is governance. OpenRouter offers a single API key per account. It does not provide role-based access controls, team-level budget enforcement, hierarchical spending limits, or policy-as-code governance. When multiple teams across a regulated enterprise share AI infrastructure, these controls are not optional.

The fourth issue is self-hosting. OpenRouter is a hosted service with no self-hosted option. For air-gapped environments, on-premise deployments, or organizations whose security policies prohibit routing internal data through external services, this is a non-starter.

Here are the alternatives that address these requirements.

1. TrueFoundry AI Gateway

Best for: Regulated enterprises that need multi-model routing with VPC deployment, compliance-grade audit trails, and centralized governance

TrueFoundry is the strongest alternative to OpenRouter for regulated industries because it provides the same multi-model convenience, a unified, OpenAI-compatible API that connects to 250+ models across every major provider, while adding the sovereignty, governance, and compliance infrastructure that regulated environments demand.

The architectural difference is fundamental. TrueFoundry deploys within your VPC, on-premise, or in air-gapped environments. Prompts, completions, and metadata never leave your controlled infrastructure. For healthcare organizations handling PHI, financial institutions processing customer data, or government agencies working with sensitive information, this eliminates the data sovereignty concern entirely.

Compliance-grade audit logging captures every request with full context: which user or service made the call, which model processed it, what guardrails were applied, what the result was, and the complete latency and cost breakdown. These logs are stored in your infrastructure, under your retention policies, exportable to your SIEM or data lake. For SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, ISO 27001, and GDPR audits, the evidence trail is comprehensive and under your control.

Governance controls go far deeper than OpenRouter's account-level API key. RBAC integrates with enterprise identity providers through Okta and Azure Entra ID, enabling SSO and fine-grained role assignments. Budget limits enforce hard spending caps per team, per user, per project, or per model. Rate limiting prevents any single application or team from exhausting shared API quotas. OPA and Cedar policy engines enable policy-as-code governance, allowing compliance teams to define and enforce rules like restricting certain models to specific environments or blocking certain tool calls based on user roles.

The guardrail suite is particularly critical for regulated industries. Built-in PII and PHI detection identifies and redacts sensitive information before it reaches model providers, addressing a core HIPAA and GDPR requirement. Prompt injection defense, content moderation, SQL sanitization, and secrets detection provide defense-in-depth against the full OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications.

The MCP Gateway extends governance to agentic workflows, ensuring that when AI agents call internal tools and databases through MCP, those interactions are authenticated, authorized, logged, and subject to the same guardrail policies as direct LLM requests.

Performance matches the convenience of a public aggregator: approximately 3-4ms latency overhead with over 350 requests per second on a single vCPU, scaling horizontally for higher throughput. The globally distributed SaaS gateway option provides managed, multi-region deployment for teams that want the governance benefits without managing infrastructure.

For regulated industries specifically, TrueFoundry's approach resolves the tension between developer convenience and compliance requirements. Development teams get the same multi-model access and simple API interface that made OpenRouter appealing. Compliance teams get the audit trails, access controls, and data sovereignty guarantees that OpenRouter cannot provide. Security teams get runtime guardrails that enforce safety policies consistently across all models and providers. This alignment across development, compliance, and security teams is what makes TrueFoundry the preferred replacement for OpenRouter in regulated environments.

Explore TrueFoundry for regulated industries →

2. AWS Bedrock

Best for: AWS-committed organizations in regulated sectors that need a managed, compliance-certified model access layer

Amazon Bedrock provides managed access to foundation models from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, and Amazon within the AWS ecosystem. For regulated industries already operating on AWS with established compliance certifications (FedRAMP, HIPAA, PCI-DSS), Bedrock inherits those certifications and integrates with IAM, CloudTrail, and VPC networking.

The compliance advantage is significant: AWS has invested heavily in certification coverage across regulated sectors, and Bedrock benefits from that infrastructure. Model invocations stay within your AWS account, and CloudTrail provides audit logging that satisfies most compliance frameworks.

The limitation is scope. Bedrock's model catalog is curated rather than comprehensive. You cannot access every model from every provider the way you can through OpenRouter or TrueFoundry. Cross-provider routing and failover are limited to models within the Bedrock catalog. And the AWS-only deployment model means multi-cloud organizations need additional infrastructure for non-AWS AI workloads. For organizations that are fully committed to AWS and can work within Bedrock's model catalog, the compliance and operational benefits are substantial. For organizations that need access to the full breadth of available models or operate across multiple clouds, the catalog and deployment constraints become limiting.

3. Azure AI Foundry

Best for: Microsoft-ecosystem enterprises in regulated industries that need integrated AI services with Azure compliance coverage

Azure AI Foundry provides model access, content safety, and deployment capabilities within the Azure ecosystem. For organizations in healthcare, financial services, and government that are already Azure-certified, extending those compliance certifications to AI workloads is the path of least resistance. Azure Content Safety provides guardrails, Azure Active Directory handles access control, and Azure Monitor covers observability.

The strengths mirror AWS Bedrock's: deep compliance certification, managed infrastructure, and integration with existing enterprise identity and monitoring systems. The limitations also mirror: scope is limited to Azure-hosted models, multi-cloud support requires additional engineering, and AI-native features like semantic caching and MCP support are less mature than in purpose-built AI gateways.

4. Google Vertex AI

Best for: GCP-native organizations in regulated sectors that need managed model access with strong data residency controls

Google Vertex AI provides access to Google's model family alongside select third-party models, with deployment options across Google Cloud's global regions. Data residency controls allow organizations to specify where model inference occurs, which matters for regulations with geographic data requirements. Integration with Google Model Armor provides content safety, and IAM-based access controls handle authorization.

Vertex AI's strength for regulated industries is Google Cloud's investment in compliance certifications and data residency. The limitation is the same ecosystem constraint: multi-provider access is narrower than what OpenRouter or TrueFoundry offer, and multi-cloud deployments require separate infrastructure for non-GCP workloads.

5. Self-Hosted Open-Source Models via vLLM or SGLang

Best for: Organizations with strict data isolation requirements that want full control over model inference

For the most stringent data sovereignty requirements, hosting open-source models on your own GPU infrastructure eliminates all third-party data exposure. Frameworks like vLLM and SGLang provide high-performance inference serving with OpenAI-compatible APIs, running entirely within your infrastructure.

The advantage is absolute data control. No prompt or completion data ever leaves your network. The trade-off is significant: you lose access to the most capable proprietary models (GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini), and you take on the full operational burden of GPU procurement, model deployment, scaling, and maintenance. For organizations that can accept open-source model capabilities, this approach provides the strongest possible data sovereignty guarantee.

TrueFoundry supports this deployment model natively, providing managed deployment of open-source models on your GPU infrastructure with the same gateway, guardrails, and governance that cover commercial API models. This allows regulated enterprises to route some workloads to self-hosted models and others to commercial APIs, all through a single governed control plane.

Choosing the Right Path

For regulated industries, the migration from OpenRouter is not about finding a like-for-like replacement. It is about recognizing that the requirements of regulated AI operations, data sovereignty, audit trails, granular governance, and runtime guardrails, demand a fundamentally different architecture than a public model aggregator can provide.

Cloud-native solutions (Bedrock, Azure AI Foundry, Vertex AI) offer the strongest compliance certification coverage within their respective ecosystems but limit multi-provider flexibility. Self-hosted models offer the strongest data control but sacrifice access to leading proprietary models and add operational burden.

TrueFoundry occupies the space between these extremes: it provides the multi-model convenience of OpenRouter with the data sovereignty, governance, and compliance infrastructure that regulated industries require. For organizations that need both flexibility and control, it represents the most complete architectural answer.

Top 5 Kong AI Gateway Alternatives in 2026

Deepti Shukla — Fri, 15 May 2026 09:12:45 +0000

Kong AI Gateway brings enterprise API management to LLM workloads, but its complexity and pricing are built for traditional API governance, not AI-native workflows. Here are the best alternatives for teams that need purpose-built AI gateway capabilities without the overhead.

Why Teams Outgrow Kong for AI Workloads

Kong earned its reputation as one of the most battle-tested API gateways in the market. Built on Nginx and OpenResty, it handles request routing, authentication, and traffic management for some of the largest API deployments in the world. When generative AI emerged as an enterprise workload, Kong extended its platform with AI-specific plugins for model routing, token-based rate limiting, semantic caching, and content moderation.

The problem is architectural.
Kong is a general-purpose API management platform that added AI capabilities as plugins. The core infrastructure, configuration model, and pricing structure all reflect its origins in traditional API governance. For teams whose primary need is managing AI traffic, this creates three friction points that drive evaluation of alternatives.

First, operational complexity. Kong requires a full platform deployment: control plane, data plane, database, and plugin configuration. Teams without existing Kong infrastructure face a steep onboarding curve to adopt it purely for AI routing. The configuration ecosystem is powerful but dense, and AI-only use cases end up paying the complexity tax of a platform designed for banking and telecom legacy systems.

Second, pricing. Kong's per-service licensing means every backend model provider counts as a distinct service. Routing to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and a self-hosted Llama instance counts as four services. The AI Rate Limiting Advanced plugin, required for token-based rate limiting rather than request-based, is locked behind the Enterprise tier. Enterprise-grade OIDC and SSO integrations are similarly restricted to paid tiers. For mid-sized AI deployments, licensing costs can exceed $50,000 annually, with a significant portion of that going toward capabilities the team never uses. Adding a new model endpoint can trigger a license upgrade event if you exceed your service quota, creating an experimentation tax that slows AI iteration.

Third, AI-native gaps. Despite the AI plugin additions, Kong lacks native MCP gateway support for agentic workflows, semantic caching at the gateway level, LLM-specific observability with token-level tracing, and the kind of AI-aware routing that understands model capabilities rather than just endpoint health. These features require AI-native architecture, not plugins added to a general-purpose gateway.

_Here are five alternatives that address these gaps._

1. TrueFoundry AI Gateway

Best for: Enterprises that need AI-native gateway capabilities with full lifecycle management, without the overhead of a general-purpose API platform

TrueFoundry represents the clearest architectural contrast to Kong. Where Kong is a traditional API gateway that added AI plugins, TrueFoundry is an AI-native gateway built from the ground up for LLM and agentic workloads. This distinction shows up in every layer of the platform.

Routing in TrueFoundry is model-aware. Virtual models enable weighted load balancing across multiple model deployments with automatic failover, latency-based routing to the fastest available endpoint, and cost-based routing that selects the most economical model capable of handling a given request. This is fundamentally different from Kong's endpoint-based routing, which treats model providers like any other HTTP backend.

Cost governance operates at the token level. Budget limits can be set per team, per user, per project, or per model, with enforcement options that block requests, downgrade to cheaper models, or trigger alerts when limits are reached. Kong's AI Rate Limiting Advanced plugin provides token-based rate limiting, but it requires the Enterprise tier and does not offer the hierarchical budget management or automated model switching that TrueFoundry includes.

The MCP Gateway is a capability Kong does not offer. TrueFoundry provides centralized MCP server registration and discovery, OAuth 2.0 authentication for tool access, RBAC at the individual tool level, and guardrails on MCP tool calls. For enterprises building agentic AI applications, this is table stakes in 2026.

Guardrails in TrueFoundry cover PII and PHI detection, prompt injection defense, content moderation, SQL sanitization, secrets detection, and code safety linting, all enforced at the gateway layer with support for third-party providers like Azure Content Safety and Google Model Armor. Kong offers content moderation through plugins, but the breadth and depth of TrueFoundry's guardrail suite is significantly greater.

Deployment supports VPC, on-premise, and air-gapped environments, matching Kong's enterprise deployment flexibility. Performance delivers approximately 3-4ms latency overhead at over 350 requests per second on a single vCPU. Pricing is based on AI workload scale rather than per-service licensing, eliminating the cost escalation that hits Kong deployments as model providers are added.

The ecosystem integration story is also compelling. TrueFoundry provides native integrations with major agent frameworks including LangChain, CrewAI, DSPy, and Agno, as well as observability tools like Langfuse, Prometheus, Grafana, and Last9. The playground feature lets teams experiment with models, prompts, and virtual model configurations before deploying to production, reducing the iteration cycles that Kong's configuration-heavy approach often requires.

For teams managing self-hosted open-source models alongside commercial API providers, TrueFoundry provides a unified gateway that covers both. Self-hosted models deployed through TrueFoundry's model serving infrastructure are automatically registered in the gateway with the same routing, guardrails, and cost tracking that apply to commercial API models. Kong can route to self-hosted models but lacks the deployment and lifecycle management layer that TrueFoundry provides.

Compare TrueFoundry vs Kong →

2. AWS API Gateway with Bedrock

Best for: AWS-native organizations that want managed AI routing within the AWS ecosystem

For teams fully committed to AWS, combining API Gateway with Amazon Bedrock provides managed AI routing without operating gateway infrastructure. Bedrock offers access to models from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, and Amazon through a unified API, with IAM-based access controls, CloudWatch monitoring, and CloudTrail audit logging.

The advantage is operational simplicity within AWS. The limitation is scope: Bedrock only covers models available through the Bedrock marketplace, and routing is limited to a single model family per request. Cross-provider orchestration, fallback across different vendors, and self-hosted model integration require custom engineering. For multi-cloud or multi-provider AI architectures, the AWS-only scope is a constraint that Kong's broader routing model actually handles better.

3. Google Apigee with Vertex AI

Best for: GCP-native enterprises that want API lifecycle management integrated with AI model access

Google Apigee brings sophisticated API management capabilities to AI workloads within the Google Cloud ecosystem. It supports semantic caching through AI-focused policies, integrates with Model Armor for content safety, and provides the developer portal and API lifecycle management features that enterprise API teams expect.

Apigee shares Kong's strength in traditional API governance while being more tightly integrated with Google's AI services. The trade-off is the same one that applies to all cloud-native solutions: it works best when your AI stack runs entirely within GCP. Multi-cloud deployments face integration overhead, and non-Google model providers require additional configuration.

4. Azure API Management with Azure OpenAI

Best for: Microsoft-ecosystem enterprises that want unified API and AI governance under Azure

Azure API Management extends its established API governance platform with AI-specific capabilities for Azure OpenAI Service. Token quotas, response caching, and load balancing are available, along with integration with Azure Content Safety for guardrails and Azure Monitor for observability. Enterprise-grade RBAC, SSO, and compliance certifications come standard.

For organizations already running Azure API Management for traditional APIs, extending it to cover AI traffic is a natural progression. The limitation is the same as other cloud-native approaches: AI capabilities are optimized for Azure-hosted models. Teams routing to non-Azure providers lose the deep integration advantages. Azure also currently lacks AI-native features like semantic caching and hierarchical budget management as first-class capabilities.

5. Envoy with Custom AI Filters

Best for: Platform engineering teams that want maximum control over their AI gateway architecture

Envoy, the high-performance proxy maintained by the CNCF, can be extended with custom filters to handle AI-specific routing, rate limiting, and observability. Several open-source projects have developed Envoy filters for LLM workloads, providing token-based rate limiting, model-aware routing, and streaming response handling.

The advantage is architectural control. Envoy is battle-tested at massive scale and provides the foundation for building exactly the AI gateway your infrastructure requires. The service mesh integration through Istio is particularly valuable for organizations already running service mesh architectures, as AI traffic can be governed through the same policy framework as other service-to-service communication.

The trade-off is engineering investment. Building and maintaining custom AI filters requires deep expertise in Envoy's filter chain, C++ or Wasm development, and ongoing maintenance as LLM provider APIs evolve. Token-based rate limiting, streaming response handling, MCP protocol support, and model-aware routing all need to be implemented and tested. For platform teams with the engineering capacity and a long-term infrastructure investment horizon, Envoy provides the most flexible foundation. For teams that need a production-ready AI gateway without building one from scratch, a purpose-built solution is more practical and faster to deploy.

How to Decide

The right Kong alternative depends on what drew you to Kong in the first place and what your AI workloads actually require.

If you chose Kong because your organization already runs it for traditional API management, the cloud-native options (AWS, Azure, Google) or staying on Kong with its AI plugins may be the least disruptive path. Adding AI plugins to existing Kong infrastructure avoids a migration entirely, though you accept the limitations of a plugin-based AI approach. For organizations where Kong handles both traditional APIs and AI traffic, the unified management model has operational value despite the AI-specific limitations.

If you are evaluating gateway options specifically for AI workloads, TrueFoundry provides the most complete AI-native alternative. It eliminates the per-service pricing model, provides native MCP support for agentic workflows, and offers deeper AI-specific capabilities than any general-purpose API gateway can deliver through plugins alone. The total cost of ownership is often lower than Kong Enterprise for AI-only deployments because you are not paying for API management capabilities you do not need.

If maximum architectural control is the priority and your team has the engineering capacity, Envoy with custom filters provides the most flexible foundation, though at significantly higher development and maintenance cost. This approach is best suited for organizations with dedicated platform engineering teams that want to own every layer of their AI infrastructure.

The broader trend in 2026 is clear: AI workloads have become different enough from traditional API traffic that they benefit from purpose-built infrastructure. Token-based pricing, streaming responses, multi-turn conversation state, agentic tool calling through MCP, and AI-specific security threats like prompt injection all require capabilities that general-purpose API gateways address through plugins rather than native architecture. As organizations scale to multi-model, multi-team, agentic architectures, the limitations of the plugin-based approach become operational constraints that purpose-built AI gateways like TrueFoundry are designed to eliminate.

Best Helicone Alternatives in 2026

Deepti Shukla — Thu, 14 May 2026 08:07:54 +0000

Helicone entered maintenance mode after its March 2026 acquisition by Mintlify. Here are the best alternatives for teams that need an actively developed AI gateway with deeper enterprise governance, MCP support, and production-grade reliability.

Why Teams Are Leaving Helicone

Helicone built a loyal following as one of the earliest LLM observability platforms, earning over 16,000 organizations as users since its Y Combinator W23 launch. Its proxy-first approach was elegant: change your OpenAI base URL, add a Helicone API key as a header, and every LLM request was automatically logged, metered, and displayed on a dashboard. No SDK installation, no instrumentation refactoring.

That chapter closed in March 2026 when Mintlify acquired Helicone. The founding team joined Mintlify in San Francisco to build AI knowledge infrastructure, and Helicone entered maintenance mode. Security patches, bug fixes, and new model support continue shipping, but active feature development has stopped. There is no roadmap for new capabilities.

For teams running production AI workloads, a maintenance-mode proxy is a risk signal. The LLM ecosystem moves fast. Provider API changes, new model architectures, evolving security threats, and emerging standards like the Model Context Protocol all demand active development from the infrastructure layer. When your gateway stops evolving, your AI stack starts accumulating technical debt.

Beyond the acquisition, Helicone had structural limitations that enterprise teams were already bumping against: no native MCP support for agentic workflows, no budget enforcement to prevent runaway spending, no VPC or air-gapped deployment options for regulated industries, and limited guardrail capabilities beyond basic logging. The platform also lacked semantic caching, relying on exact-match caching that missed semantically equivalent queries with different wording. Enterprise identity provider integration through SSO was limited to higher pricing tiers, and team-level cost attribution required custom property tagging rather than native organizational structures. The acquisition accelerated migration timelines, but the underlying gaps were already driving evaluation.

Here are the five strongest alternatives, starting with the platform that addresses Helicone's gaps most comprehensively.

1. TrueFoundry AI Gateway

Best for: Enterprise teams that need observability, governance, and cost enforcement in a single production-grade platform

TrueFoundry is the most comprehensive alternative to Helicone because it addresses every limitation that drove teams to evaluate alternatives, while adding capabilities that Helicone never offered.

Where Helicone provided observability through a proxy, TrueFoundry provides observability through an AI Gateway that also handles routing, guardrails, cost enforcement, and MCP governance. This distinction matters because observability without control is just a dashboard. TrueFoundry lets you see a cost anomaly and enforce a budget limit in the same platform, detect a prompt injection and block it through a guardrail, or identify a latency spike and reroute traffic to a faster model, all without switching tools.

TrueFoundry exposes an OpenAI-compatible API, so applications that were pointing at Helicone's proxy can redirect to TrueFoundry's gateway with a base URL change. Request logging captures prompts, completions, token counts, latency, and cost with the same granularity that Helicone users expect, plus deeper agent-level tracing that covers MCP tool calls, multi-step workflows, and retrieval chains.

Cost management goes far beyond what Helicone offered. TrueFoundry provides per-request cost tracking with attribution to teams, projects, and custom metadata tags, but it also enforces budget limits, rate limits, and automated routing to cheaper models when budgets are exhausted. Semantic and exact-match caching reduces token consumption for repetitive query patterns. These are enforcement mechanisms, not just dashboards.

Enterprise governance features include RBAC, SSO integration with providers like Okta and Azure Entra ID, audit logging for compliance frameworks like SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR, and fine-grained access controls through OPA and Cedar policy engines. The platform deploys within your VPC, on-premise, or in air-gapped environments, addressing the data sovereignty requirements that Helicone's cloud-hosted model could not satisfy.

The MCP Gateway provides centralized management of MCP servers with OAuth 2.0 authentication, tool-level access controls, and guardrails on tool calls, positioning TrueFoundry for the agentic AI workflows that are becoming the dominant architecture in 2026.

Performance is production-grade: approximately 3-4ms latency overhead, over 350 requests per second on a single vCPU, with horizontal scaling for higher throughput. The globally distributed SaaS gateway option is deployed across multiple regions for teams that prefer a managed service without self-hosting.

Observability extends beyond what Helicone offered. Full request traces capture not just prompts and completions but the entire agent execution path, including MCP tool invocations, retrieval steps, multi-turn conversation context, and latency breakdowns at each stage. Integration with Prometheus and Grafana means teams already running standard DevOps observability stacks can ingest TrueFoundry metrics natively. Analytics dashboards provide cost breakdowns by model, provider, team, and time period, with budget limit status and spend projections that export to standard formats for corporate finance systems.

Start migrating from Helicone →

2. Langfuse
Best for: Open-source teams that want self-hosted LLM tracing and prompt management without a gateway layer

Langfuse is the natural alternative for teams that valued Helicone primarily for its observability features rather than its gateway capabilities. With over 21,000 GitHub stars and an MIT-licensed core, Langfuse provides end-to-end tracing, prompt management, evaluation, and dataset curation. The recent acquisition by ClickHouse signals long-term investment in the platform's data infrastructure.

The migration from Helicone to Langfuse requires more integration work than a simple URL swap because Langfuse uses SDK-based instrumentation rather than a proxy model. Native SDKs for Python and TypeScript, plus connectors for LangChain, LlamaIndex, and over 50 other frameworks, cover most integration scenarios. Self-hosting is well-documented for teams with data residency requirements.

The limitation is scope. Langfuse is an observability and prompt management platform, not a gateway. It does not handle request routing, load balancing, caching, guardrails, or cost enforcement. Teams replacing Helicone with Langfuse still need a separate solution for the gateway layer. The evaluation and dataset curation features, however, are significantly deeper than what Helicone offered, making Langfuse a strong upgrade for teams whose primary concern is understanding and improving LLM output quality rather than managing infrastructure.

3. Arize AI (Phoenix)

Best for: Data science teams that need deep ML observability with RAG-specific debugging

Arize Phoenix extends ML observability to LLM applications with particular strength in embedding analysis and retrieval diagnostics. For teams running RAG pipelines, Phoenix provides debugging capabilities for retrieval quality that neither Helicone nor most other alternatives offer. The open-source core, licensed under ELv2, supports tracing, evaluation, and experimentation with OpenTelemetry compatibility.

Phoenix is a stronger fit for teams whose observability needs center on model quality and retrieval performance rather than infrastructure-level concerns like routing and cost management. The embedding-level analysis tools allow teams to visualize how retrieval quality affects output quality, identify clustering patterns in queries, and detect drift in embedding distributions over time. It complements a gateway solution rather than replacing one.

4. Datadog LLM Monitoring

Best for: Organizations already running Datadog that want LLM observability within their existing APM stack

Datadog's LLM monitoring adds AI-specific metrics to the platform's established APM and infrastructure monitoring suite. Token usage, cost-per-request, and spending trends appear alongside traditional infrastructure metrics. The integration means AI cost anomalies trigger alerts through the same channels as server health issues.

The appeal is consolidation: no new vendor, no new dashboard, no new login. The limitation is depth. Datadog treats LLM monitoring as an extension of application performance monitoring rather than a purpose-built AI observability platform. It lacks the evaluation workflows, prompt management, agent tracing, and gateway-level controls that dedicated platforms provide. For teams whose primary requirement is adding AI visibility to existing Datadog infrastructure, it is the lowest-friction option.

5. OpenObserve

Best for: Teams that want unified LLM and infrastructure observability in a single open-source deployment

OpenObserve unifies LLM observability with traditional infrastructure monitoring, covering logs, metrics, traces, and frontend monitoring in one platform. The open-source, self-hostable architecture appeals to teams with strict data control requirements, and the platform accepts telemetry from any OpenTelemetry-compatible source.

OpenObserve is strongest for platform engineering teams that want to consolidate their observability stack. The claim of 140x lower storage costs compared to alternatives matters for organizations with high data volumes and long retention requirements. LLM-specific features like evaluation, prompt management, and agent tracing are less mature than in purpose-built platforms, but active development is closing those gaps. Like Langfuse, it is an observability tool rather than a gateway, so it addresses the monitoring side of what Helicone offered but not the routing, caching, or rate limiting. Teams adopting OpenObserve typically pair it with a gateway solution like TrueFoundry for a complete replacement of Helicone's functionality.

Making the Migration Decision

The right Helicone alternative depends on what you were actually using Helicone for and what your production requirements demand.

If you used Helicone primarily as a lightweight proxy for logging and cost visibility, Langfuse or OpenObserve can replace the observability layer, though you will need a separate gateway for routing and caching. Both are open-source and self-hostable, which gives you the data control that Helicone's cloud-hosted model sometimes made difficult.

If you need the proxy functionality plus enterprise governance, TrueFoundry provides the most complete replacement. It covers everything Helicone did, observability, caching, rate limiting, and cost tracking, while adding the budget enforcement, guardrails, MCP support, and VPC deployment options that Helicone lacked. The migration is also the simplest: because TrueFoundry exposes an OpenAI-compatible API, applications previously pointing at Helicone's proxy can redirect with a base URL change.

If you are already invested in a broader monitoring stack, extending Datadog or pairing Arize with your existing infrastructure may be the path of least resistance. These approaches avoid introducing a new platform into your toolchain at the cost of less depth in AI-specific governance.

For teams currently evaluating their options, the timing is favorable. The Helicone team has committed to helping customers migrate while the platform remains in maintenance mode. Waiting until maintenance mode ends or until a critical provider API change breaks compatibility creates unnecessary risk. The question is not whether to move, but where, and the answer depends on whether you need an observability tool, a gateway, or both.

Top 10 AI Cost Management Tools for Enterprises in 2026

Deepti Shukla — Mon, 11 May 2026 10:28:59 +0000

The AI Cost Crisis Enterprises Did Not See Coming

Enterprise AI spending has a visibility problem. When a single customer support agent handling 10,000 daily conversations can generate over $7,500 per month in API costs, and that is just one application on one team, costs compound quickly into budget line items that catch finance leaders off guard. Multiply across multiple teams, products, model providers, and environments, and AI costs become unpredictable and unmanageable without purpose-built tooling.

The root causes are structural. LLM pricing is token-based, making costs variable and difficult to forecast. Different models have wildly different pricing: a complex query routed to GPT-4o costs orders of magnitude more than the same query handled by a smaller, faster model. Most organizations lack the instrumentation to attribute AI costs to specific teams, projects, or features, so there is no accountability loop. And the most expensive resource in the AI stack, GPU compute for self-hosted models, is often provisioned based on peak demand rather than actual utilization, creating persistent waste.

Gartner has specifically identified AI cost optimization as a critical enterprise challenge, featuring TrueFoundry in its report on best practices for optimizing generative and agentic AI costs. The consensus emerging in 2026 is that AI cost management is not a finance problem that can be solved with spreadsheets; it is an infrastructure problem that requires cost awareness built into the routing, caching, and governance layers of the AI stack.

Here are the ten tools and platforms leading this space.

1. TrueFoundry

Best for: Enterprises that need end-to-end AI cost control with budget enforcement, caching, and intelligent routing in a single platform

TrueFoundry takes the most comprehensive approach to AI cost management because cost controls are embedded directly in its AI Gateway, the same infrastructure layer that handles every LLM request. This is not a separate analytics dashboard that shows you what you spent last month; it is a real-time enforcement layer that prevents overspending as it happens.

The cost tracking system calculates the cost of every request across any model provider, whether it is OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, AWS Bedrock, Azure, or a self-hosted model, and attributes it to configurable dimensions: team, project, environment, user, or custom metadata tags. This granular attribution solves the accountability problem that plagues most enterprise AI deployments. When the data science team can see that their experimental agent consumed $8,000 in tokens last week while the production chatbot spent $2,000, the conversation about optimization becomes concrete.

Budget limiting is where TrueFoundry goes beyond visibility into enforcement. You can set hard spending limits per team, per user, per project, or per model. When a budget is exhausted, the gateway can block further requests, route them to a cheaper model, or trigger an alert, depending on the configured policy. This prevents the scenario that terrifies finance teams: an agent caught in a retry loop or a prompt injection attack that racks up thousands of dollars in API charges before anyone notices.

Rate limiting complements budget controls by capping the volume of requests on a per-minute basis. This prevents both cost overruns and API quota exhaustion, which is particularly important when multiple teams share the same provider API keys.

Semantic and exact-match caching at the gateway level provides one of the highest-leverage cost optimizations available. When a request is identical or semantically similar to a recent request, the cached response is returned without making an API call. For applications with repetitive query patterns, such as customer support chatbots, internal knowledge assistants, or code generation tools, caching can reduce token consumption dramatically. The semantic caching implementation uses embedding similarity to match semantically equivalent queries even when the wording differs, which catches a broader range of cacheable requests than exact-match alone.

Intelligent routing through virtual models enables cost-based model selection. You can configure a virtual model that routes simple queries to a fast, cheap model and complex queries to a more capable, expensive model, with automatic fallback if the primary model is unavailable or overloaded. The latency-based routing option sends requests to the fastest available endpoint, which often also means the least congested (and therefore most cost-efficient) endpoint.

For self-hosted models, TrueFoundry's deployment platform provides GPU utilization metrics that surface underutilized infrastructure. Autoscaling policies can scale GPU instances down during low-traffic periods and up during demand spikes, avoiding the common pattern of paying for peak GPU capacity around the clock. Sticky routing for KV cache optimization reduces redundant computation by routing related requests to the same inference server, directly lowering GPU utilization per request.

The analytics dashboard provides cost breakdowns by model, provider, team, and time period, with budget limit status and spend projections. These reports export to standard formats for integration with corporate finance systems.

Explore TrueFoundry Cost Management →

2. Langfuse

Best for: Open-source teams that need cost tracking integrated with LLM tracing and evaluation

Langfuse provides cost tracking as part of its broader LLM observability platform, calculating per-request costs based on model pricing and token usage. The MIT-licensed open-source core means teams can self-host cost data alongside traces, prompts, and evaluations without sending usage data to a third party. Cost metrics are surfaced in dashboards alongside latency and quality metrics, providing a unified view of the operational health of LLM applications.

The strength is the integration between cost data and the rest of the observability stack. You can identify that a specific prompt template is costing twice as much as an alternative, or that a retrieval step is returning too many tokens of context and inflating costs. The limitation is that Langfuse provides visibility without enforcement: it shows you what things cost but does not include budget caps, rate limits, or automated routing optimization. Teams use it to identify cost problems, then implement fixes in their application code or gateway configuration.

3. OpenRouter

Best for: Developers who want unified access to hundreds of models with transparent per-token pricing

OpenRouter provides a unified API layer for accessing models from dozens of providers, with transparent per-token pricing that makes cost comparison straightforward. The platform surfaces real-time pricing for every model, allowing developers to compare cost-performance tradeoffs before selecting a model for a specific use case.

The cost management value is primarily in pricing transparency and model selection. OpenRouter makes it easy to see that Model A costs $0.50 per million input tokens while Model B costs $2.00, helping teams make informed choices. Usage dashboards track spending over time. The platform does not provide budget enforcement, team-level attribution, or automated cost optimization features, so for enterprise governance, it typically serves as a model access layer rather than a complete cost management solution.

4. Weights & Biases (Weave)

Best for: ML teams that want cost visibility integrated into experiment tracking and evaluation workflows

Weights & Biases tracks LLM costs within its Weave observability platform, attributing spend to specific experiments, prompts, and model versions. This integration is particularly valuable during the development phase, when teams are iterating on prompts and model selection. You can see the cost impact of changing from GPT-4o to Claude Sonnet for a specific task, or measure how a prompt optimization reduces token usage.

The cost data feeds into W&B's experiment comparison tools, making it natural to include cost as a dimension alongside quality and latency when evaluating model and prompt choices. The limitation is the same as Langfuse: visibility without enforcement. W&B does not include production budget limits or automated cost optimization in the inference path.

5. Datadog LLM Monitoring

Best for: Enterprises with existing Datadog deployments that want AI costs visible alongside infrastructure costs

Datadog surfaces LLM cost metrics within its broader monitoring platform, providing token usage, cost-per-request, and spending trends alongside traditional infrastructure metrics. The value is consolidation: AI costs appear in the same dashboards, alerts, and reporting as compute, storage, and networking costs, giving finance and operations teams a unified view of technology spending.

Integration with Datadog's alerting system means you can set up threshold alerts for AI spending spikes, catching anomalies quickly. The limitation is that Datadog monitors costs but does not control them. Budget enforcement, rate limiting, and routing optimization are outside its scope. For enterprises that already use Datadog and want AI cost visibility added to their existing monitoring, the integration is seamless. For cost control, a gateway-level solution is needed.

6. Kubecost

Best for: Platform teams that need to attribute GPU and compute costs to specific workloads on Kubernetes

Kubecost provides real-time cost monitoring and allocation for Kubernetes clusters, which is directly relevant for enterprises running self-hosted LLM inference. The platform attributes GPU, CPU, memory, and storage costs to individual pods, namespaces, and labels, making it possible to determine exactly how much each model deployment costs in infrastructure terms.

For self-hosted inference workloads, Kubecost answers the question that cloud billing cannot: how much GPU compute is each specific model or team actually consuming? The platform integrates with major cloud providers to combine infrastructure costs with spot pricing, reserved instance discounts, and other billing nuances. The limitation is that Kubecost tracks infrastructure costs, not API token costs. For organizations running a mix of self-hosted and commercial API models, Kubecost covers one half of the cost picture.

7. Vantage

Best for: FinOps teams that need cloud cost management with emerging AI-specific visibility

Vantage provides cloud cost management with support for the major cloud providers and increasingly, AI-specific cost categories. The platform can surface costs from AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, and Google Vertex AI alongside traditional compute and storage spending. For FinOps teams already using Vantage, adding AI cost visibility is a natural extension.

The strength is the FinOps-native approach: budgets, anomaly detection, and cost optimization recommendations are built into the platform. The limitation is that Vantage operates at the cloud billing level, so it sees aggregate API charges rather than per-request token-level detail. It cannot tell you which prompt template is driving costs up or which team is responsible for a spending spike. It pairs well with a token-level cost tracking tool for complete visibility.

8. Infracost

Best for: DevOps teams that want to catch AI infrastructure cost changes before they are deployed

Infracost provides cost estimates for infrastructure-as-code changes, showing the cost impact of Terraform or Pulumi changes before they are applied. A developer proposing to double GPU instances for a model deployment sees the monthly cost impact in the pull request review. The scope is infrastructure provisioning costs rather than runtime token costs, making it a complementary tool.

9. Cast AI

Best for: Kubernetes teams that want automated GPU and compute optimization for AI workloads

Cast AI provides automated Kubernetes cost optimization, including GPU workload placement, autoscaling, and spot instance management. The platform continuously analyzes cluster utilization and applies optimizations such as rightsizing GPU instances and bin-packing workloads. For enterprises running GPU inference on Kubernetes, Cast AI delivers significant savings through automated infrastructure optimization.

10. Cloud Provider Native Tools

Best for: Teams that need basic AI cost visibility within their existing cloud management workflow

Each major cloud provider offers native cost management tools that increasingly include AI-specific cost categories. AWS Cost Explorer breaks down Bedrock charges by model. Azure Cost Management surfaces OpenAI Service spending. GCP cost tools track Vertex AI consumption. For single-cloud organizations, native tools provide baseline visibility without additional vendor relationships.

The limitation is fragmentation. Multi-cloud or multi-provider AI deployments require manual aggregation. Token-level attribution, team-level allocation, and budget enforcement are limited or absent. Native tools are a starting point that most enterprises outgrow as AI usage scales.

Building an AI Cost Management Strategy

Effective AI cost management in 2026 requires controls at multiple layers of the stack.

At the request layer, a gateway like TrueFoundry provides per-request cost tracking, budget enforcement, rate limiting, and caching. These are the highest-leverage controls because they operate in the inference path and can prevent overspending in real time.

At the infrastructure layer, tools like Kubecost and Cast AI optimize the GPU and compute costs of self-hosted model deployments. For organizations running their own inference infrastructure, these tools address the single largest line item in the AI budget.

At the financial layer, cloud cost management tools and FinOps platforms like Vantage provide the aggregate view that finance and executive stakeholders need for budgeting and planning.

At the development layer, experiment tracking tools like Langfuse and Weights & Biases help teams make cost-aware decisions during model and prompt development, before costly choices reach production.

The organizations controlling AI costs most effectively are not using a single tool but building a cost-aware culture supported by controls at every layer. The gateway provides enforcement, the infrastructure tools provide optimization, the financial tools provide accountability, and the development tools provide awareness. Together, they transform AI cost management from a reactive spreadsheet exercise into a continuous optimization loop embedded in how teams build and operate AI systems.

Top 10 GPU Inference Optimization Platforms in 2026

Deepti Shukla — Fri, 08 May 2026 09:37:51 +0000

Why GPU Inference Optimization Is the New Bottleneck

The cost of running large language models in production is dominated by GPU inference. Training gets the headlines, but inference is where enterprises spend the bulk of their AI compute budget, month after month, as every customer query, agent action, and automated workflow requires GPU cycles to generate responses. For a typical enterprise running multiple LLM-powered applications, inference costs can easily reach tens of thousands of dollars per month, and that number grows linearly with usage unless the infrastructure is actively optimized.

The challenge is multidimensional. Model size determines baseline VRAM requirements: a 70B parameter model at FP16 needs roughly 140GB of GPU memory just for weights. The choice of inference engine determines how efficiently memory and compute are used. Quantization strategies trade varying degrees of quality for significant throughput improvements. And the orchestration layer determines how requests are batched, routed, and scaled across available GPU resources.

Getting all of these layers right simultaneously is what separates production-grade inference from prototype-grade inference. The platforms in this category address different parts of this stack, from full-lifecycle inference management to specialized serving engines and cloud-hosted GPU access. Here are the ten that matter most in 2026.

1. TrueFoundry

Best for: Enterprises that need end-to-end LLM deployment with gateway-level routing, autoscaling, and cost optimization

TrueFoundry addresses GPU inference optimization not as an isolated infrastructure problem but as part of a broader AI operations stack. The platform provides containerized model deployment with support for all major inference engines, including vLLM, SGLang, and TRT-LLM, alongside an AI Gateway that handles intelligent routing, load balancing, and cost optimization at the request level.

The deployment workflow starts with the model registry, where teams can store, version, and manage both proprietary and open-source models. From the registry, deploying a model to GPU infrastructure takes a few clicks or API calls, with TrueFoundry handling the container configuration, GPU scheduling, and autoscaling policies. The platform supports automatic model caching, which eliminates redundant downloads when scaling replicas, and GPU-aware scheduling that places workloads on appropriate hardware.

The standout optimization feature is sticky routing for KV cache optimization. When a request arrives, the gateway routes it to the inference server that already has the relevant KV cache warmed up from previous requests in the same conversation or with the same system prompt. This avoids the cold-start penalty of recomputing attention for repeated prefixes, significantly reducing latency and GPU utilization for multi-turn conversations and agent workflows. Combined with SGLang's Radix Attention, which stores computations in tries and reuses cached attention for requests with identical prefixes, this creates a powerful optimization layer that most standalone serving solutions lack.

The AI Gateway adds request-level intelligence that inference engines alone cannot provide. Virtual models enable weighted load balancing across multiple model deployments, automatic failover when a model instance becomes unhealthy, and latency-based routing to the fastest available endpoint. Semantic and exact-match caching at the gateway level intercepts repeated or similar requests before they reach GPU resources, reducing token consumption without application-level changes. Rate limiting and budget controls prevent any single team or application from monopolizing shared GPU capacity.

For self-hosted models, TrueFoundry provides an OpenAI-compatible API layer, so applications written against the OpenAI SDK work without code changes when switched to self-hosted models. This interchangeability between commercial and self-hosted models, managed through the same gateway, gives enterprises the flexibility to shift workloads based on cost, latency, or data sovereignty requirements.

The platform deploys on any Kubernetes cluster across AWS, GCP, Azure, or on-premise infrastructure. Air-gapped deployments are supported for organizations where no data can leave the internal network. GPU optimization dashboards surface utilization metrics, inference latency percentiles, and cost-per-token breakdowns by model and team.

Explore TrueFoundry Model Deployment →

2. vLLM

Best for: Open-source teams that need high-throughput LLM serving with broad model support

vLLM has emerged as the default open-source inference serving framework, and for good reason. Its PagedAttention algorithm applies virtual memory concepts to KV cache management, enabling efficient handling of variable-length sequences without the memory waste of traditional contiguous allocation. The result is two to four times the throughput of naive implementations on the same hardware.

Continuous batching dynamically groups incoming requests, maximizing GPU utilization even under variable load. The OpenAI-compatible API means vLLM can serve as a drop-in replacement for OpenAI endpoints, requiring no application code changes. Model support is comprehensive, covering Llama, Mistral, Qwen, Falcon, and most popular architectures, with new models typically supported within weeks of release. Built-in quantization support for AWQ and GPTQ allows loading 4-bit models without separate conversion steps.

vLLM is strongest for high-throughput batch and queue-based workloads. For real-time applications where per-request latency matters more than aggregate throughput, its advantage is less pronounced. It is an inference engine, not a platform: deployment, scaling, routing, and monitoring are left to the operator. Many enterprises run vLLM behind TrueFoundry or similar platforms to add those operational capabilities.

3. SGLang

_Best for: Teams running multi-turn agents or shared-prefix workloads where KV cache reuse is critical
_
SGLang builds on PagedAttention with Radix Attention, a technique that stores computations in tries and reuses cached attention for requests sharing identical prefixes. For multi-turn conversations, multi-stage agent workflows, or any scenario where many requests share the same system prompt, computation drops significantly because the shared prefix only needs to be processed once.

Performance benchmarks show SGLang achieving higher throughput than vLLM for these shared-prefix workloads, sometimes substantially. The framework is optimized specifically for structured generation patterns common in agent applications. The trade-off is a smaller ecosystem compared to vLLM: fewer integrations, less documentation, and a steeper onboarding curve. For the specific workload profile it targets, SGLang delivers measurable improvements that justify the investment.

4. TensorRT-LLM

Best for: Organizations running NVIDIA GPUs that need maximum possible performance from their hardware

TensorRT-LLM is NVIDIA's official LLM inference solution, and when raw performance on NVIDIA hardware is the primary objective, nothing else comes close. The framework compiles models into optimized TensorRT engines with kernel fusion, memory layout optimization, and hardware-specific tuning that general-purpose serving frameworks cannot match. On identical hardware, TensorRT-LLM consistently outperforms vLLM by 20-40%, which translates directly into fewer GPUs needed at scale.

FP8 inference on H100 GPUs is where TensorRT-LLM shines brightest, delivering roughly double the throughput of FP16 with minimal quality degradation. For p99 latency-critical applications, the optimized kernels provide more consistent performance than PagedAttention-based engines.

The cost is complexity. Models must be compiled before running, a process that takes 30-60 minutes and locks the compiled model to specific GPU types and CUDA versions. The development and debugging workflow is significantly heavier than vLLM or SGLang. TensorRT-LLM is the right choice when you are serving millions of requests daily on fixed NVIDIA hardware and the 20-40% performance advantage translates into meaningful cost savings.

5. NVIDIA NIM

Best for: Teams that want optimized, container-packaged model deployment with minimal configuration

NVIDIA NIM (NVIDIA Inference Microservices) provides pre-optimized, container-packaged model deployments that abstract away the complexity of inference engine configuration. Each NIM container includes a model with the appropriate inference engine, quantization, and hardware optimization pre-configured for specific GPU types. You pull the container, provide your GPU resources, and get an optimized inference endpoint with an OpenAI-compatible API.

TrueFoundry supports deploying NVIDIA NIM models directly, listing supported NIM containers in its model catalog for one-click deployment with automatic GPU scheduling and autoscaling. The convenience of NIM is significant for teams that do not want to become inference engine experts. The trade-off is less flexibility: you get NVIDIA's optimization choices rather than tuning the stack yourself, and the model catalog is limited to NVIDIA-supported models.

6. Anyscale (Ray Serve)

Best for: Teams running complex ML pipelines that need unified orchestration across training, fine-tuning, and serving

Anyscale, built on the Ray distributed computing framework, provides a unified platform for ML workflows from data processing through training to production serving. Ray Serve handles model deployment with autoscaling, multi-model composition, and request batching. The distributed nature of Ray means inference workloads can scale across clusters of GPUs with built-in fault tolerance.

The platform is strongest when inference is part of a broader ML pipeline that also includes data processing, training, and evaluation on the same infrastructure. For teams focused purely on LLM serving, the full Ray stack may be more infrastructure than needed. Ray Serve integrates with vLLM and other inference engines, so it operates as an orchestration layer rather than a competing serving solution.

7. Modal

Best for: Developers who want serverless GPU inference with zero infrastructure management

Modal provides serverless GPU compute with a Python-first developer experience. You write inference code using Modal's decorators, and the platform handles container building, GPU scheduling, scaling, and shutdown automatically. Cold start times are aggressively optimized, and you pay only for actual GPU compute time.

The serverless model is compelling for workloads with variable or bursty demand, where maintaining always-on GPU instances would be wasteful. Modal supports vLLM and other inference frameworks within its serverless containers. The trade-off is less control over the infrastructure layer: you cannot optimize GPU configuration, networking, or storage as precisely as you can on dedicated infrastructure. For teams that value developer velocity over infrastructure control, Modal is among the best options available.

8. Replicate

Best for: Prototyping and moderate-scale production with a simple API-driven deployment model

Replicate provides hosted model inference through a simple API, allowing developers to run open-source models without managing GPU infrastructure. Models are packaged as containers and deployed to Replicate's GPU fleet with per-prediction pricing. The platform excels at reducing time-to-first-inference for open-source models, though per-token costs at scale are higher than self-managed infrastructure.

9. RunPod

Best for: Cost-conscious teams that need bare-metal GPU access with flexible pricing

RunPod provides GPU cloud infrastructure with both on-demand and spot pricing, along with a serverless inference platform. Full control over software configuration makes it straightforward to run vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM on RunPod GPUs. RunPod is infrastructure rather than platform: it gives you GPUs and networking, while you bring the serving stack, monitoring, and operational tooling.

10. Together AI

_Best for: Teams that want optimized hosted inference for popular open-source models with competitive pricing
_
Together AI provides hosted inference for open-source models with proprietary optimizations that achieve competitive latency and throughput. The platform has invested heavily in inference engine optimization, including custom kernels and memory management, achieving strong performance across popular model families. An OpenAI-compatible API simplifies integration.

The hosted model selection covers the most popular open-source models, and pricing is transparent on a per-token basis. The main limitation is vendor dependency: you are running on Together AI's infrastructure with their optimization choices, and custom or proprietary models require separate arrangements. For teams that want fast, optimized access to popular open-source models without managing GPU infrastructure, Together AI provides a polished experience.

Putting It All Together

GPU inference optimization in 2026 is a layered problem that rarely has a single-tool solution.

At the inference engine layer, vLLM is the default for general-purpose serving, SGLang wins for shared-prefix and multi-turn workloads, and TensorRT-LLM delivers maximum performance on NVIDIA hardware when the compilation overhead is acceptable.

At the deployment and orchestration layer, the choice depends on how much infrastructure your organization is willing to manage. Fully managed platforms like Modal, Replicate, and Together AI minimize operational burden. Infrastructure providers like RunPod provide raw GPU access for maximum control and cost optimization. Kubernetes-native platforms like TrueFoundry sit in the middle, providing managed deployment workflows while preserving the flexibility to choose your inference engine, GPU hardware, and cloud provider.

At the routing and optimization layer, an AI Gateway like TrueFoundry's adds intelligence that inference engines alone cannot provide: cross-model load balancing, failover, semantic caching, and cost-based routing that continuously optimizes the cost-performance tradeoff as your model portfolio evolves.

The organizations getting the most from their GPU investment in 2026 are combining all three layers: a high-performance inference engine running on appropriately sized GPU infrastructure, managed through a deployment platform that handles autoscaling and lifecycle management, with an intelligent gateway that optimizes request routing, caching, and cost controls across the entire fleet.

Top 10 MCP Server Management Platforms in 2026

Deepti Shukla — Wed, 06 May 2026 11:44:28 +0000

Evaluate the best platforms for registering, governing, and scaling MCP servers across your enterprise. Compare centralized registries, gateway solutions, and deployment platforms for production agentic AI.

The Enterprise MCP Management Problem

The Model Context Protocol has gone from an Anthropic experiment to an industry standard faster than almost any integration protocol in recent memory. Anthropic launched MCP in November 2024, OpenAI adopted it in April 2025, and Microsoft integrated it into Copilot Studio by mid-2025. As of early 2026, MCP SDK downloads are in the tens of millions per month, and directories index over 20,000 MCP servers, though many are forks, variants, or abandoned projects.

For individual developers, connecting an MCP server to Claude Desktop or a coding assistant is straightforward. For enterprises, the challenge is entirely different. When dozens of teams are building agents that connect to internal tools, databases, and external APIs through MCP, you need answers to questions that the protocol itself does not address: Who has access to which tools? How do you authenticate connections across SSO providers? Where are the audit logs that prove which agent called which tool with what data at what time? How do you enforce consistent security policies across hundreds of MCP server connections? And how do you prevent the sprawl of unmanaged integrations that create the same kind of shadow IT problem that enterprises have been fighting for years?

As one engineer put it: many organizations end up stitching together three different tools for deployment, authentication, and monitoring, and then nobody wants to own the glue code. That is the problem this category exists to solve.

The 2026 MCP protocol roadmap explicitly calls out enterprise readiness as a top priority, with specific gaps around audit logs, SSO-integrated auth, gateway behavior, and configuration portability. The platforms below address these gaps in different ways, and the differences matter.

1. TrueFoundry MCP Gateway

Best for: Enterprises that need a centralized MCP control plane with full governance, guardrails, and multi-provider observability

TrueFoundry's MCP Gateway is an enterprise-ready platform that addresses the full lifecycle of MCP server management: registration, discovery, authentication, authorization, observability, and policy enforcement. It is not a standalone MCP product but rather a native extension of TrueFoundry's AI Gateway, which means MCP tool calls benefit from the same routing, guardrails, cost controls, and audit infrastructure that govern LLM requests.

The centralized MCP registry allows teams to register both public and self-hosted MCP servers in the TrueFoundry Control Plane. This gives the organization a single catalog of every tool available to AI agents, with visibility into which servers are active, what tools they expose, and who has access. The registry supports the automatic generation of MCP servers from OpenAPI specifications, so teams can expose existing REST APIs to AI agents without writing custom MCP server code.

Authentication and authorization are handled at the gateway layer. OAuth 2.0 support covers enterprise identity providers including Okta and Azure Entra ID, with RBAC policies that control access down to individual tools. A marketing team's agent can use the CRM tools but not the engineering database tools, and these permissions are enforced centrally rather than depending on each MCP server to implement its own access control.

The virtual MCP server feature allows organizations to compose tools from multiple underlying MCP servers into a single logical server, simplifying the agent developer's experience while maintaining fine-grained governance behind the scenes. Guardrails apply to MCP tool calls just as they do to LLM requests: PII redaction, content moderation, prompt injection detection, and custom policy enforcement all operate on the data flowing through tool interactions.

Observability covers the full agent workflow. Request traces show not just the LLM call but every tool invocation, including which MCP server was called, what parameters were passed, what was returned, and how long it took. Cost tracking attributes MCP-related spending to specific teams and projects. This level of visibility is essential for enterprises scaling agentic AI, where a single agent action might chain multiple tool calls with real-world consequences.

The gateway deploys within your VPC or on-premise, and supports air-gapped environments. For regulated industries where MCP tool calls might touch sensitive internal systems, the data sovereignty guarantee is non-negotiable.

Explore TrueFoundry MCP Gateway →

2. Prefect Horizon

Best for: Teams that build MCP servers with FastMCP and want one platform for deploy, catalog, and governance

Prefect Horizon covers the entire MCP server lifecycle in a single platform: deployment, registry, gateway, and agent connectivity. It is built by the team behind FastMCP, the Python SDK that powers a significant share of all MCP servers across languages. If you have been using FastMCP to create your MCP servers, Horizon is designed as the fastest path from development to production deployment.

The Horizon Registry serves as a central catalog of every MCP server in the organization. The Horizon Gateway handles RBAC down to individual tools, authentication, audit logs, logging, and usage visibility. MCP clients connect through the gateway, which manages client ID authentication and access to each server's tools and data.

The main limitation is that Horizon is Python and FastMCP-centric. If your team builds MCP servers primarily in TypeScript or Go, the native integration advantage is less relevant. Enterprise governance features require a paid tier beyond the free personal plan.

3. Composio

Best for: Agent developers who need a massive catalog of pre-built tool integrations without managing infrastructure

Composio operates as an agentic integration platform with an MCP Gateway on top, providing hosted MCP servers with no infrastructure to manage and access to over 850 integrations. The platform positions itself as an agent-developer-first experience, offering deep native SDK integrations with frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, and Autogen. A centralized control plane sits between AI agents and tools, with SOC 2 and ISO certification, RBAC controls, and audit trails.

Composio is strongest when you need breadth of third-party integrations without the engineering investment of building and hosting your own MCP servers. The trade-off is less control over the infrastructure layer. Pricing tied to compute time and invocation counts can become significant at enterprise scale, and because tool actions are pre-built, customization depth for complex internal workflows may be limited compared to self-hosted approaches.

4. Docker MCP Gateway

Best for: Platform teams that prioritize security isolation and already operate container-centric infrastructure

Docker MCP Gateway takes a container-first approach to MCP server management. It provides Docker Compose orchestration for multi-server deployments and cryptographically signed container images to address supply chain security concerns. Each MCP server runs in its own container sandbox, providing strong process isolation that is valuable for security-sensitive environments.

The container-based model fits naturally into organizations already standardized on Docker workflows. The main limitations are the absence of governance features beyond container-level isolation. There is no built-in equivalent to per-team or per-consumer tool filtering, budget controls, or hierarchical access management. Latency overhead varies depending on container startup and caching behavior. Docker MCP Gateway works well as a deployment mechanism but typically needs to be paired with a separate governance layer for enterprise use.

5. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

Best for: AWS-native organizations that want managed MCP capabilities within the Bedrock ecosystem

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, launched in 2025, is AWS's managed platform for deploying and running agentic AI applications. It includes an MCP gateway capability as part of its broader agent infrastructure, with native integration into AWS services like IAM, CloudWatch, and Secrets Manager. For organizations deeply invested in the AWS ecosystem, the managed nature of AgentCore removes significant operational overhead.

The scope is limited to the AWS ecosystem. Multi-cloud or hybrid deployments that need MCP governance across providers will require an additional management layer. AgentCore is best viewed as the MCP management solution for all-in AWS shops rather than a standalone, cloud-agnostic platform.

6. Cloudflare Workers with Remote MCP

Best for: Teams that want to deploy MCP servers at the edge with global distribution and built-in state management

Cloudflare allows you to deploy MCP servers directly on their Workers platform, leveraging the global edge network for low-latency tool access. The standout technology is Durable Objects, which provide persistent state for each agent without requiring a centralized database. Remote MCP servers run on the Workers platform with OAuth authentication handled at the edge.

The approach is compelling for consumer-facing AI applications where global latency and state management are primary concerns. The limitation for enterprise use is the absence of centralized governance features like tool-level RBAC, budget controls, or compliance-grade audit logging. Cloudflare provides the deployment infrastructure for MCP servers but not the enterprise management plane around them.

7. StackOne

Best for: HR tech and B2B SaaS teams that need unified API access to vertical SaaS platforms via MCP

StackOne provides managed MCP servers focused on unified API access to vertical SaaS platforms, particularly strong in HR tech integrations covering applicant tracking systems, HRIS platforms, and payroll systems. The platform normalizes data schemas across providers, so an agent interacting with employee data gets a consistent interface regardless of the underlying system.

The narrow vertical focus is both the strength and limitation. For HR and recruitment AI use cases, StackOne offers depth that horizontal platforms cannot match. For broader enterprise MCP management, a more general platform is needed.

8. Arcade.dev

Best for: Developer teams that need a flexible MCP runtime with custom tool definitions

Arcade.dev provides an MCP runtime layer that allows developers to define, host, and expose tools to AI agents. The platform handles authentication, rate limiting, and tool execution, with a developer-oriented interface that prioritizes flexibility in how tools are defined and composed. The runtime supports custom authorization flows and provides structured tool outputs that agents can parse reliably.

Arcade is strongest for teams building custom tool integrations where pre-built connectors do not exist. The focus on runtime execution means less emphasis on the registry, governance, and compliance features that larger enterprises require. It pairs well with a gateway layer like TrueFoundry's MCP Gateway for organizations that need both custom tool flexibility and centralized governance.

9. Truto

Best for: Teams that want dynamically generated MCP tools from existing unified API integrations

Truto takes a unified API approach to MCP, dynamically generating MCP tools from existing integrations without requiring custom server code. The platform connects to CRMs, communication tools, project management systems, and other SaaS platforms, then automatically exposes those integrations as MCP-compatible tools. This approach significantly reduces the time to expose enterprise SaaS data to AI agents.

The dynamic generation model means you get breadth quickly, but the tool definitions may not be as precise or optimized as hand-crafted MCP servers. For enterprise teams that need to iterate rapidly on which tools agents can access, the automatic generation is a strong advantage. For scenarios requiring fine-tuned tool behavior, custom MCP servers may still be necessary.

Architecture Considerations for Enterprise MCP

When evaluating MCP server management platforms, three architectural patterns have emerged.

The first pattern is a gateway-centric approach, where all MCP traffic flows through a centralized gateway that handles authentication, authorization, guardrails, and observability. TrueFoundry's MCP Gateway exemplifies this model. The advantage is consistent governance across all tool interactions, unified audit trails, and the ability to apply the same security policies to MCP calls as to LLM requests. The trade-off is an additional network hop for every tool call.

The second pattern is a platform-centric approach, where MCP servers are deployed and managed through a dedicated platform that handles the full lifecycle from development to production. Prefect Horizon represents this model. The advantage is operational simplicity for MCP server deployment and management. The trade-off is that governance features may not extend to MCP servers hosted outside the platform.

The third pattern is the integration-centric approach, where MCP tools are automatically generated from existing API integrations. Composio, Truto, and Zapier represent this model. The advantage is rapid time-to-value with minimal engineering investment. The trade-off is less control over tool behavior and potential gaps in enterprise governance.

For most enterprises, the recommended approach combines elements: use an integration platform for third-party SaaS connectivity, build custom MCP servers for internal tools and databases, and route all MCP traffic through a centralized gateway for governance, guardrails, and observability. This layered architecture provides both the speed of pre-built integrations and the control that regulated environments demand.

Top 10 LLM Observability Platforms in 2026

Deepti Shukla — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 08:13:32 +0000

Why LLM Observability Has Become Non-Negotiable

Running large language models in production without observability is like flying a plane without instruments. Traditional application monitoring captures HTTP status codes and response times, but it completely misses the failure modes unique to LLM systems: hallucinated outputs that look perfectly valid, silent cost overruns from token-heavy prompts, degraded retrieval quality in RAG pipelines, and model drift that only surfaces when a customer complains.

The LLM observability market has grown significantly, with Gartner predicting that by 2028, LLM observability investments will account for 50% of GenAI deployments, up from roughly 15% in early 2026. That growth reflects a real operational need. As enterprises move from one-off chatbot experiments to multi-model, multi-team architectures powering customer-facing workflows, the cost of not seeing what is happening inside your AI systems becomes existential.

A proper LLM observability platform should provide end-to-end tracing of every request across models, tools, and agent steps. It should track token usage, latency, and cost at a granular level, per team, per user, and per model. It should offer evaluation capabilities that go beyond simple latency checks to measure output quality, faithfulness, and safety. And critically for enterprises, it should produce audit trails that satisfy compliance requirements under regulations like the EU AI Act and frameworks like the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.

What separates the leaders from the rest in 2026 is whether observability is just a dashboard you look at, or a control layer you act through. The best platforms connect what you see in production directly to what you can do about it: enforce budget limits, trigger fallbacks, block unsafe outputs, and route traffic intelligently.

Here are the ten platforms that define the category this year.

1. TrueFoundry
Best for: Enterprises that need observability fused with real-time operational control

TrueFoundry stands out because it does not treat observability as a standalone product bolted onto the side. Instead, observability is embedded directly into its AI Gateway, the same layer that handles routing, guardrails, rate limiting, and cost controls for every LLM request flowing through your infrastructure. This means that when you spot a cost anomaly or a latency spike, you are already in the platform that can act on it, adjust a budget limit, reroute traffic to a cheaper model, or tighten a guardrail, without switching tools or writing custom integrations.

The platform provides full request-level tracing with detailed logs capturing prompts, completions, token counts, latency breakdowns, and cost attribution. These traces extend beyond simple LLM calls to cover the full agent execution path, including MCP tool calls, retrieval steps, and multi-turn conversations. The integration with Prometheus and Grafana means teams already running standard DevOps observability stacks can ingest TrueFoundry metrics without adopting an entirely new monitoring paradigm.

Cost tracking deserves special mention. TrueFoundry calculates costs per request across any model provider, then rolls them up by team, project, environment, or custom metadata tags. Combined with budget limiting and rate limiting features, this creates a closed loop: you do not just see that a team is over budget, you can enforce a hard cap that prevents further spending. For enterprises managing dozens of teams and hundreds of AI applications, this level of cost governance through the observability layer is a significant differentiator.

Deployment flexibility is another strength. TrueFoundry can be deployed within your VPC, on-premise, or in air-gapped environments, ensuring that sensitive prompt and completion data never leaves your controlled infrastructure. The gateway itself handles over 350 requests per second on a single vCPU with approximately 3-4ms of latency overhead, so observability does not come at the cost of production performance.

Learn more about TrueFoundry AI Gateway Observability →

2. Langfuse
Best for: Open-source teams that want self-hosted LLM-specific tracing and prompt management

Langfuse has earned its position as the most widely adopted open-source LLM observability platform, with over 21,000 GitHub stars and an MIT-licensed core. Recently acquired by ClickHouse, the platform covers end-to-end tracing, prompt management, evaluation, and dataset curation in a single package. Native SDKs for Python and TypeScript, plus connectors for over 50 frameworks including LangChain, LlamaIndex, and the Vercel AI SDK, make integration straightforward for most teams.

The self-hosted option is well-documented and actively maintained, which matters for organizations with strict data residency requirements. Langfuse Cloud offers a free tier for up to 50,000 events per month, making it accessible for teams at any scale. The main trade-off is that Langfuse focuses purely on the application layer. It does not include infrastructure monitoring, cost enforcement, or gateway-level controls, so teams typically pair it with a separate platform for those capabilities.

3. Arize AI (Phoenix)
_Best for: ML teams that need unified observability across both traditional ML models and LLMs
_
Arize AI brings deep ML observability heritage to the LLM space through its Phoenix platform. The open-source core, licensed under ELv2, provides tracing, evaluation, and experimentation with a particular strength in embedding-level analysis and retrieval diagnostics. If your production system includes RAG pipelines, Phoenix is especially useful for debugging retrieval quality. It includes built-in hallucination detection and integrates with OpenTelemetry, so traces can flow into existing observability infrastructure.

Arize is a strong choice for data science teams that operate both traditional ML models and LLM-powered applications and want a single observability layer across both. The platform tends to be more technical in orientation, which can be a strength for engineering teams but a barrier for cross-functional collaboration with product or compliance stakeholders.

4. LangSmith
Best for: Teams deeply invested in the LangChain and LangGraph ecosystem

LangSmith is LangChain's unified agent engineering platform, providing observability, evaluations, and prompt engineering for any LLM application. While it works with any framework, including the OpenAI SDK and Anthropic, its deepest integration is naturally with LangChain and LangGraph, where it produces high-fidelity execution trees showing every tool selection, retrieved document, and intermediate reasoning step.

The Annotation Queues feature stands out for teams that need cross-functional collaboration. Subject matter experts can review, label, and correct complex traces, feeding domain knowledge directly into evaluation datasets. This creates a structured feedback loop between production behavior and engineering improvements that most observability tools lack. LangSmith is most compelling when your agent stack already runs on LangChain; for other stacks, the value proposition is less differentiated.

5. Datadog LLM Monitoring
Best for: Organizations already running Datadog that want unified infrastructure and LLM monitoring

Datadog has extended its industry-leading APM and infrastructure monitoring platform with LLM-specific capabilities. The advantage is consolidation: if your organization already uses Datadog for tracing, logging, and alerting, enabling LLM observability is a configuration change rather than a new vendor evaluation. Out-of-the-box dashboards provide token usage, latency, and cost visibility, and LLM traces integrate naturally with your existing application traces.

The limitation is depth. Datadog treats LLM monitoring as an add-on layer to its core APM product rather than a first-class evaluation and quality loop. It does not currently offer the evaluation maturity, prompt management, or agent-specific debugging depth of purpose-built LLM observability platforms. For teams whose primary concern is correlating LLM performance with infrastructure health, Datadog is a pragmatic choice. For teams focused on AI quality and safety, a dedicated platform typically provides more value.

6. Weights & Biases (Weave)
Best for: ML engineering teams that want observability tightly integrated with experiment tracking

Weave is the LLM observability product from Weights & Biases, extending the company's well-established ML experiment tracking into the world of production LLM applications. Guardrails are implemented as scorers that wrap AI functions, supporting toxicity detection across multiple dimensions, PII identification via Microsoft Presidio, and hallucination detection. These scorers can run synchronously to block harmful outputs or asynchronously for continuous monitoring.

The deep integration with the broader W&B ecosystem means teams already using W&B for model training and evaluation can extend their existing workflows seamlessly into production monitoring. The platform supports both Python and TypeScript, though the ecosystem remains primarily Python-first. Weave is strongest for ML-heavy organizations that view LLM observability as an extension of their existing experiment tracking discipline.

7. OpenObserve
Best for: Teams that want a single open-source platform covering LLM observability and full-stack infrastructure monitoring

OpenObserve takes a distinctive approach by unifying LLM observability with traditional infrastructure monitoring, covering logs, metrics, traces, and frontend real user monitoring in a single deployment. For teams tired of managing a separate DevOps telemetry stack alongside a dedicated LLM tool, OpenObserve eliminates that overhead entirely. The platform claims 140x lower storage costs compared to alternatives, which matters for organizations with high data volumes.

OpenObserve accepts telemetry from any OpenTelemetry-compatible instrumentation, making it fully provider-agnostic. The trade-off is that LLM-specific features like evaluation, prompt management, and agent tracing are less mature than in purpose-built platforms. Teams often pair OpenObserve with Langfuse, using OpenObserve for infrastructure-level visibility and Langfuse for application-layer LLM tracing.

8. PostHog
Best for: Product-led teams that want to combine LLM monitoring with user behavior analytics

PostHog bundles LLM observability alongside product analytics, session replay, feature flags, A/B testing, and error tracking. This combination is uniquely powerful for teams that need to understand not just how their LLM performs technically, but how users actually interact with it. You can correlate LLM generation quality with user retention funnels, run prompt A/B tests using the same experiment framework as product features, and watch session replays of AI interactions to see exactly what users experienced.

With over 32,000 GitHub stars and an MIT license, PostHog's open-source credentials are strong. The LLM analytics features include generation capture with cost, latency, and usage metrics, and a free tier offers 100,000 LLM observability events per month. The platform is less suited for deep agent debugging or evaluation workflows, but for product teams that view LLM features as part of the broader product experience, the unified analytics approach is compelling.

9. Confident AI
Best for: Teams that prioritize evaluation-first observability with research-backed quality metrics

Confident AI is built around DeepEval, one of the most widely adopted open-source LLM evaluation frameworks, and brings over 50 research-backed metrics directly into the observability layer. These cover faithfulness, relevance, safety, hallucination detection, and more. Rather than treating evaluation as a separate step from observability, Confident AI unifies them: production traces flow directly into evaluation pipelines, and failures surface automatically in evaluation datasets.

The standout capability is the automatic dataset curation from production traces, which closes the loop between what breaks in production and what you test next. The platform is OpenTelemetry-native with integrations for over 10 frameworks. Confident AI is most compelling for teams where output quality and safety are the primary observability concerns, rather than cost optimization or infrastructure health.

How to Choose the Right Platform

The right LLM observability platform depends on where your organization sits in its AI maturity journey and what you need to optimize for.

If your primary concern is operational control and cost governance across a multi-team, multi-model environment, a gateway-integrated platform like TrueFoundry provides the tightest loop between visibility and action. If you need open-source flexibility with self-hosting, Langfuse is the community standard. If your existing infrastructure is built on a specific vendor stack, extending that stack with Datadog or the W&B ecosystem reduces operational complexity.

For teams focused specifically on AI quality and safety evaluation, Confident AI and Comet Opik offer the deepest purpose-built capabilities. And for product-led organizations that view LLM features through the lens of user experience, PostHog's unified analytics approach is uniquely positioned.

The critical question is not which platform has the most features, but which one aligns with how your organization actually operates its AI systems. The best observability platform is the one your team will actually use every day to make better decisions about your AI in production.

What Is Agentic AI? A Precise Technical Definition for Engineers in 2026

Deepti Shukla — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:53:30 +0000

Why the definition matters now

'Agentic AI' has become one of the most overloaded terms in the industry. Vendors apply it to chatbots with an extra tool call. Analysts apply it to autonomous systems making consequential decisions across multi-day workflows. Engineers building production systems need a precise definition — one that has architectural implications, not just marketing ones.
This article provides that definition, distinguishes agentic AI from related concepts, and maps the definition to the infrastructure requirements it creates.

The precise definition

An agentic AI system is a system in which an AI model operates as the decision-making engine of a goal-directed workflow, autonomously determining which actions to take — including invoking external tools, retrieving information, and modifying state in external systems — across multiple sequential steps, without requiring human input at each step.
Four properties distinguish agentic AI from simpler AI applications.

All four must be present for a system to qualify as genuinely agentic:

Goal-directedness — the system is given an objective, not a fixed sequence of instructions. It determines the sequence of steps required to reach the objective.
Multi-step execution — the system executes multiple actions in sequence, using the output of each action to inform the next. A single tool call followed by a single response is not agentic.
Autonomous tool use — the system can invoke external tools, APIs, and services to gather information or take actions, without a human approving each invocation.
State modification — the system can change state in external systems: writing to databases, sending messages, triggering workflows, updating records.

A chatbot that answers questions is not agentic. A chatbot that can answer questions and search the web is not agentic — it is a tool-augmented LLM. A system that receives a goal, searches the web to understand the context, queries a database for relevant data, drafts a response, and sends it via email — without human approval at each step — is agentic.

Agentic AI vs related concepts

Agentic AI vs AI agents
An AI agent is an instance of an agentic system — a running process that embodies the four properties above. 'Agentic AI' refers to the broader class of AI systems with these properties; 'AI agent' refers to a specific deployed instance. You build an agentic AI system; you run AI agents.

Agentic AI vs automation
Traditional automation executes predefined scripts. The sequence of steps is fixed at design time. Agentic AI determines the sequence of steps at runtime based on the goal and the results of each prior action. Automation is deterministic; agentic AI is adaptive. Automation fails when reality deviates from the script; agentic AI re-plans.

Agentic AI vs copilots
A copilot suggests actions for a human to take. A human reviews and approves each suggestion. Agentic AI takes actions directly, with the human reviewing outcomes rather than approving each step. The distinction is in the human's position in the loop: before action (copilot) or after action (agentic).

Key distinction: The defining property of agentic AI is not capability — it is autonomy over multi-step action sequences. A less capable model that acts autonomously is more agentic than a more capable model that requires human approval at every step.

The architectural implications

The four properties of agentic AI create specific infrastructure requirements that do not exist for simpler AI applications:

Goal-directedness requires planning infrastructure: the system must be able to represent goals, generate action plans, and revise plans when actions produce unexpected results. This is typically handled at the agent framework layer (LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI), but the infrastructure must preserve plan state across multi-step executions.

Multi-step execution requires session management: the state of an ongoing workflow must be preserved between steps, including context accumulated through tool calls. This state must be durable — a transient network failure should not lose an in-progress four-step workflow.

Autonomous tool use requires an access control layer: when a human approves each action, the human is the access control mechanism. When the agent approves its own actions, the infrastructure must enforce the controls that prevent the agent from invoking tools it should not use, accessing data it should not read, or performing actions it should not take. This is what an agent gateway provides.

State modification requires audit logging: actions with real-world consequences must be traceable. Who authorised the action? What was the agent's reasoning? What was the exact input to the tool? What did the tool return? These questions need answers without relying on memory.

Why 2026 is the inflection point

Gartner predicts that by 2029, 70% of enterprises will deploy agentic AI as part of IT infrastructure operations, up from less than 5% in 2025. Industry surveys report that only 21% of enterprises have mature governance models for autonomous agents. More than 40% of agentic AI projects are projected to fail by 2027 due to inadequate governance.
The infrastructure gap between 'agentic AI works in a demo' and 'agentic AI runs reliably in production with governance and compliance' is the defining challenge of 2026. The organisations that close this gap first — with proper agent gateways, observability layers, and access controls — are the ones whose agents will still be running in 2027.

TrueFoundry — Agent Gateway

TrueFoundry's platform provides the complete infrastructure layer for production agentic AI: the AI Gateway for LLM routing, fallback, and cost management; the MCP Gateway for governed tool access with tool-level RBAC and OAuth; the Agent Gateway for multi-agent orchestration, session management, and A2A routing; and the observability layer for full execution traces across the entire agentic stack. If the four properties of agentic AI create four infrastructure requirements, TrueFoundry addresses all four in a single deployable control plane.

Explore TrueFoundry's Gateways →

Securing MCP in Production: PII Redaction, Guardrails, and Data Exfiltration Prevention

Deepti Shukla — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 09:31:08 +0000

Production is a different security environment

In development, the worst that happens when an agent misbehaves is a confusing output or a wasted API call. In production, an agent with access to real customer data, live databases, and external communication tools can exfiltrate sensitive records, corrupt data, or generate outputs that violate regulatory requirements — all before a human has a chance to intervene. The security controls that suffice in development are not the security controls that production demands.

This article covers the three security mechanisms that differentiate a development-quality MCP deployment from a production-quality one: PII redaction, input and output guardrails, and systematic data exfiltration prevention.

PII redaction in MCP workflows

AI agents frequently retrieve content that contains personally identifiable information: customer records, support tickets, medical notes, financial statements. In many architectures this content flows directly into the LLM's context window, creating two risks. First, the LLM may echo PII in its output — into a response visible to other users, into a log that persists, or into a tool call parameter sent to an external system. Second, if the LLM provider processes data outside your regulatory jurisdiction, sending PII to it may violate data residency requirements.

Effective PII redaction in an MCP context operates at the gateway layer, on tool call outputs, before they reach agent memory. When a tool returns a customer record, the gateway inspects the response and redacts or pseudonymises fields that should not enter LLM context: social security numbers, credit card numbers, passport numbers, medical identifiers, and similar sensitive categories.

This approach has a significant advantage over redaction in agent code: it is applied consistently regardless of which agent or framework sent the tool call. Developers do not need to implement redaction logic individually; it is enforced at the infrastructure layer.

Compliance note: For HIPAA, GDPR, and EU AI Act compliance, PII redaction at the gateway layer produces an auditable control point. Regulators can be shown that PII does not flow into model context, without relying on individual agent implementations.

Input guardrails: defending against injected instructions

Input guardrails inspect content flowing into the agent — through tool call outputs, through user messages, through retrieved documents — for patterns that suggest prompt injection attempts. The goal is to identify and neutralise malicious instructions before they reach the LLM's reasoning step.

A practical input guardrail stack for production MCP deployments includes:
Injection pattern detection — scanning for instruction-format text in content that should be purely data (tool outputs, database records, email content)
Jailbreak attempt detection — identifying requests that attempt to override the agent's system prompt or operational boundaries
Anomalous instruction detection — flagging content that contains imperative verbs targeting sensitive operations (delete, transfer, exfiltrate) in contexts where such instructions are not expected
Source-aware trust scoring — applying stricter scanning to content from less trusted sources (user-submitted content, scraped web pages) than to content from internal verified systems
Input guardrails are not foolproof — adversarial prompt injection is an active research area and attack patterns evolve — but they significantly raise the cost of successful injection attacks and catch the large category of opportunistic, non-sophisticated attempts.

Output guardrails: controlling what agents produce

Output guardrails operate on what the agent generates — responses, tool call parameters, messages sent to users — before they leave the controlled environment. Key output guardrail functions:

PII detection in agent outputs — ensuring the agent has not included customer data, credentials, or internal identifiers in responses that will be logged or transmitted
Sensitive action validation — requiring a secondary confirmation before agents invoke high-risk tools (write, delete, send) when triggered by unusual reasoning chains
Response schema validation — ensuring agent outputs conform to expected formats before being passed to downstream systems
Content policy enforcement — blocking outputs that violate organisational content policies (competitor mentions, regulatory prohibited language, inappropriate content)

Data exfiltration prevention

The subtlest production security challenge is the multi-step exfiltration scenario: an agent uses a combination of legitimately authorised tool calls to move sensitive data to an unauthorised destination. Each individual tool call passes access control checks, but the sequence achieves an outcome that was never intended to be authorised.

Consider an agent authorised to read from a customer database and send Slack messages. A prompt injection in a retrieved record instructs the agent to read all customer records matching a certain criterion and forward them to an external Slack workspace. Each tool call — database read, Slack message — is authorised. The combination is an exfiltration.

Preventing this requires session-level behavioural monitoring: tracking the sequence of tool calls within a workflow and detecting patterns that deviate from established baselines. Specific controls include:
Volume anomaly detection — alerting when an agent reads an unusually high volume of records in a single session
Cross-system data flow monitoring — flagging when data retrieved from a read tool is passed as a parameter to a write or send tool
Destination validation for communication tools — checking that external communication tool calls target only pre-approved destinations

TrueFoundry MCP Gateway
TrueFoundry's MCP Gateway applies both input and output guardrails to every tool call as a native infrastructure capability. PII redaction runs on tool outputs before they reach agent context, with configurable sensitivity categories. Input guardrails detect prompt injection and jailbreak patterns in retrieved content. Output guardrails enforce content policies and validate tool call parameters. Full session traces via OpenTelemetry enable post-incident investigation and anomaly detection across tool call sequences. All guardrail events are logged with full context for compliance audit trails.

The operational checklist for production MCP security
Before promoting any agentic MCP workflow to production, validate these controls are in place: PII redaction is configured on all tool outputs that return customer or employee data; input guardrails are enabled and tuned for your content sources; output guardrails are active on all tool calls with write access; RBAC is configured at the tool level with least-privilege principles; every tool call is logged with agent identity and full request/response; and a runbook exists for responding to a suspected agent security incident, including how to suspend an agent's tool access without taking the product offline.

[Explore TrueFoundry's Gateways →]{truefoundry.com)

How to Implement RBAC for MCP Tools: A Practical Guide for Engineering Teams

Deepti Shukla — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 07:48:02 +0000

Role-Based Access Control for APIs is familiar territory for most engineering teams. You define roles, assign permissions to roles, assign roles to users, and enforce the policy at the API gateway. The model maps cleanly to REST: a role either can or cannot call a given HTTP endpoint.

MCP introduces a richer access control problem. A single MCP server may expose dozens of tools, each with different risk profiles. The query_database tool and the delete_records tool live on the same server, but the consequences of unauthorised access are orders of magnitude different. MCP RBAC must operate at the tool level — and in mature implementations, at the parameter level — not just the server level.

The three layers of MCP access control

Layer 1: Server-level access
The coarsest control: which agent roles are allowed to connect to which MCP servers at all. This is analogous to traditional API gateway RBAC. A CustomerSupportAgent role might be allowed to connect to the CRM MCP server and the ticketing MCP server, but not the billing MCP server. Server-level access control is the baseline — necessary but not sufficient.

Layer 2: Tool-level access
Within a server, individual tools can have different access policies. On the CRM MCP server, the SupportAgent role might have access to get_customer, search_customers, and add_note, but not to update_credit_limit or delete_customer. Tool-level RBAC requires the gateway to parse the incoming tool call, identify which tool is being invoked, and check the caller's permissions against the policy for that specific tool before forwarding the request.

Layer 3: Parameter-level access
The most granular control constrains what values agents can pass to tool parameters. A reporting agent might be allowed to call the query_database tool, but only with read-only SQL statements — no INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE. A customer agent might be allowed to call get_customer, but only for customers assigned to their team, not all customers. Parameter-level access control requires the gateway to inspect and validate tool call parameters against policy rules, not just the tool identity.

Practical note: Most teams start with server-level access control and add tool-level as they identify risk differences between tools on the same server. Parameter-level is the right approach for high-risk tools like database writes or financial transactions.

Designing your MCP role taxonomy

Before implementing RBAC, you need a role taxonomy that reflects your actual agent personas. A useful starting structure:
Read-only agents — agents that only retrieve information; should never have access to write, update, or delete tools
Workflow agents — agents that execute defined business processes; access to write tools is scoped to specific objects and actions within the workflow
Admin agents — agents that manage infrastructure or configuration; should be treated with the same scrutiny as human admin accounts
Privileged agents — agents that require elevated access for specific tasks; should use ephemeral credentials and be time-limited

These categories map to groups in your identity provider. When an engineer builds a new agent and assigns it to the Read-Only group, it inherits the read-only policy automatically — no individual permission configuration required.

Mapping roles to tool policies

For each MCP server, create an explicit policy matrix: which roles have access to which tools, with what parameter constraints. This is best maintained as code in your gateway configuration repository, subject to the same code review process as application code.

A practical policy matrix for a hypothetical billing MCP server might look like this: the BillingReadAgent role has access to get_invoice, list_invoices, and get_payment_status. The BillingWriteAgent role has those plus create_invoice and update_payment_status. The BillingAdminAgent role has full access including cancel_subscription and issue_refund, but requires a secondary approval workflow for refunds above a threshold.

Handling agent-to-agent access control

Multi-agent workflows — where one agent orchestrates others — introduce a delegation challenge. If Agent A has broad permissions and delegates a subtask to Agent B, should Agent B inherit Agent A's permissions for the duration of that subtask? The answer, in a properly secured system, is no. Agent B should operate under its own permissions, not a superset inherited through delegation.

This principle — that delegated agents do not inherit the delegator's permissions — is enforced by routing all agent-to-tool calls through the gateway and evaluating each call against the calling agent's own policy, regardless of how the workflow was initiated.

Auditing and policy iteration

RBAC policies should be treated as living documents. As your agent use cases evolve, over-permissioned roles accumulate. Quarterly access reviews — comparing which tools each agent actually invoked in the past period against what they are permitted to invoke — reveal permissions that can be tightened without breaking functionality. The gateway audit log is the data source for this review.

How TrueFoundry MCP Gateway Implements RBAC for MCP Tools

Implementing RBAC at the tool level across dozens of MCP servers, multiple agent roles, and different environments is operationally complex when done manually. TrueFoundry's MCP Gateway is purpose-built to handle this complexity, providing a centralised control plane that enforces access policies consistently across your entire agent fleet.

Tool-level access control, configured centrally

TrueFoundry's MCP Gateway enforces RBAC at the tool level through access control settings configurable per server, per tool, and per environment. Rather than relying on individual development teams to implement their own access checks, TrueFoundry applies policies at the gateway layer — ensuring every agent, regardless of which framework it was built with, is subject to the same access rules. This eliminates the inconsistency that arises when access control is distributed across teams.

Native identity provider integration

TrueFoundry's MCP Gateway integrates directly with enterprise identity providers — Okta, Azure AD, and custom OIDC IdPs — so agent roles stay synchronised with your organisational structure. When roles change in your IdP, those changes propagate to tool-level permissions automatically. There is no separate permission system to maintain; your existing identity infrastructure becomes the source of truth for MCP access control.

Federated authentication with Auth 2.0

TrueFoundry supports federated login and OAuth 2.0 with dynamic discovery to secure tokens across all MCP server connections. Agents authenticate once with the gateway and receive scoped access to exactly the tools their role permits — no credential sprawl, no embedded secrets. On-Behalf-Of flows ensure agents act with the initiating user's identity and permissions, not a broad service account.

Environment-aware RBAC

TrueFoundry's MCP Gateway supports environment grouping — dev, staging, and production MCP servers each carry separate RBAC rules. A developer can freely access dev-environment tools while building and testing agents, but promoting to staging or production requires satisfying stricter access policies. This mirrors the environment promotion workflows platform teams already use for application code.

Complete audit trail for compliance and right-sizing

Every tool invocation that passes through TrueFoundry's MCP Gateway is logged against the calling agent's identity, the target tool, and the parameters used. This produces the audit trail needed for compliance reviews, incident investigation, and the quarterly access right-sizing reviews described earlier. When it's time to tighten over-permissioned roles, the data is already there — no instrumentation required.

Out-of-the-box integrations and custom MCP servers

TrueFoundry ships with prebuilt MCP server integrations for Slack, Confluence, Sentry, Datadog, and other enterprise tools — ready to enable with RBAC policies applied from day one. For internal or proprietary APIs, TrueFoundry's bring-your-own MCP server capability lets teams register any service as an MCP server in minutes, making it discoverable and governed through the same centralised gateway.

Enterprise-grade deployment options

TrueFoundry's MCP Gateway is deployable across VPC, on-prem, air-gapped, and multi-cloud environments. It meets SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance standards, with 24/7 enterprise support and SLA-backed response times. No data leaves your domain — access control enforcement and audit logging happen entirely within your infrastructure.

Common RBAC mistakes in MCP deployments

The most frequent access control failure in MCP deployments is the service account antipattern: running all agents under a single, broadly privileged service account that has access to everything. This feels convenient in development — no permission errors, no access denied — and is a serious risk in production, because any agent compromise becomes a full-system compromise.

The second most common failure is role proliferation: creating a new bespoke role for every new agent, resulting in hundreds of roles that nobody can reason about. A small, well-defined role taxonomy applied consistently is easier to maintain and audit than a large collection of single-agent roles.

Explore TrueFoundry's Gateways →

DEV Community: Deepti Shukla

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