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Cover image for Bifrost: An LLM Gateway built for enterprise-grade reliability, governance, and scale(50x Faster than LiteLLM)
Pranay Batta
Pranay Batta

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Bifrost: An LLM Gateway built for enterprise-grade reliability, governance, and scale(50x Faster than LiteLLM)

If you’re building LLM applications at scale, your gateway can’t be the bottleneck. That’s why we built Bifrost, a high-performance, fully self-hosted LLM gateway in Go. It’s 50× faster than LiteLLM, built for speed, reliability, and full control across multiple providers.

Key Highlights:

  • Ultra-low overhead: ~11µs per request at 5K RPS, scales linearly under high load.
  • Adaptive load balancing: Distributes requests across providers and keys based on latency, errors, and throughput limits.
  • Cluster mode resilience: Nodes synchronize in a peer-to-peer network, so failures don’t disrupt routing or lose data.
  • Drop-in OpenAI-compatible API: Works with existing LLM projects, one endpoint for 250+ models.
  • Full multi-provider support: OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, Azure, and more.
  • Automatic failover: Handles provider failures gracefully with retries and multi-tier fallbacks.
  • Semantic caching: deduplicates similar requests to reduce repeated inference costs.
  • Multimodal support: Text, images, audio, speech, transcription; all through a single API.
  • Observability: Out-of-the-box OpenTelemetry support for observability. Built-in dashboard for quick glances without any complex setup.
  • Extensible & configurable: Plugin based architecture, Web UI or file-based config.
  • Governance: SAML support for SSO and Role-based access control and policy enforcement for team collaboration.

Benchmarks : Setup: Single t3.medium instance. Mock llm with 1.5 seconds latency

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

Why it matters:

Bifrost behaves like core infrastructure: minimal overhead, high throughput, multi-provider routing, built-in reliability, and total control. It’s designed for teams building production-grade AI systems who need performance, failover, and observability out of the box.x

Get involved:

The project is fully open-source. Try it, star it, or contribute directly: https://github.com/maximhq/bifrost

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