Why AI Traffic Needs More Than an API Gateway
This post was published against 1.0.0 and referred to the gateway image as
ghcr.io/dvarahq/dvara/dvara-llm-gateway. The package was renamed to
ghcr.io/dvarahq/dvara-gateway in 1.7.0, so the original command no longer pulls anything. The
commands below have been updated to the current image and tag. The post also described the MCP
Proxy as a dedicated process on port 8070; in 1.7.0 the MCP and A2A planes moved into the gateway
process, so that port no longer exists and the sentence has been corrected. Current documentation
calls this component the DVARA MCP Gateway. The rest of the post is unchanged.
Your API gateway handles TLS termination, rate limiting, and request routing. It does these things well. But when your traffic carries prompts, tokens, tool calls, and model-specific payloads, an API gateway becomes a passthrough — it can see the HTTP envelope but not the AI semantics inside it.