Agent Router

Agent Router is an open-source project of the Agentic AI Foundation, formerly known as Envoy AI Gateway, built on Envoy Proxy and Envoy Gateway. It gives application teams a single OpenAI-compatible API for hosted and self-hosted models and for MCP tools, while platform teams manage providers, credentials, routing, quotas and failover centrally. The latest listed release is v1.2.0, and the code is licensed under Apache 2.0.

What It Is

Agent Router is a gateway and control plane for AI and agent traffic. Providers, credentials, tools and limits are described once in configuration, which Agent Router turns into Envoy configuration; Envoy then carries the traffic. The docs state it is not an agent framework and does not tell an agent how to reason. Its value is clearest when AI traffic crosses provider, team, security, cost or operational boundaries.

How It Works

An agent points its OpenAI-compatible client at the router, so switching models means changing the model name. The documented capabilities include:

• Routing to providers such as Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Vertex AI, Azure OpenAI and self-hosted vLLM.
• Provider fallback, model name virtualization, and token limits per team, app or model.
• Provider credentials kept in the router rather than in agent code.
• A single MCP tool catalog drawn from many MCP servers and filtered by caller identity.
• Inference-aware routing with Kubernetes InferencePool support.
• Observability following OpenTelemetry GenAI conventions.

Setup Path

On a laptop, running aigw run with a provider API key starts a local router at localhost:1975, and MCP servers can be added with a mcp-servers config file. The same configuration can be deployed on Kubernetes with Envoy Gateway. A hosted option is offered by Tetrate, and the site lists other commercial solutions built on the project.

Current Status

The project was renamed from Envoy AI Gateway; the docs state that the CRDs, API group, aigw CLI, container images and Helm charts are unchanged, so there is nothing to migrate.