Tetrate and Bloomberg want to contribute their code to Envoy to create "Envoy AI Gateway", similarly to how there is an "Envoy Gateway" spec. Do you see this as being complementary or competitive with your work?
It's early days, so while there might be some overlap, I am sure there is a lot that we can do together to build complimentary products.
Based on the press release, its kinda hard to tell exactly how different/alike we will be, but Arch will always be "designed-first" for prompts and LLM application workloads without exposing all Envoy related features. And Envoy is "designed-first" for micro-services application workloads. So there will be some overlap but our design principles will deviate over time I feel. But we are very open to collaborating with the community here...
That's a fair point - technically it protects the application from malicious attempts to subvert the desired LLM experience. The more specific language (and I think we could do better here) would be that Arch ensures users remain within the bounds of an intended LLM experience. That at least was the intention behind "ensure safe user interactions"...
Jailbreak ensures a smooth developer experience by controlling what traffic from user make its way to the model. With jailbreak (and other guardrails soon to be added) developers can short-circuit response and with observability developers can get insights on how users are interacting with their APIs.
Lately, I have seen few gateways around LLM. Namely, openrouter, portkey.ai, etc.
My key question is, who would be the ideal customer who would need a proxy or a gateway like this? Why couldn't it be an extension or plugin of existing LBs, proxies etc.
1/ Arch builds on Envoy so that we don't re:invent all the HTTP(s)/TCP level capabilities needed in a modern gateway for applications. So in that sense, we agree with you that it should "extend" something vs. rewriting the whole stack. There are several security and robustness guarantees that we borrow from Envoy as a result of this. To be more specific, a lot of Arch's core implementation today is an Envoy filter written in Rust.
1/ Arch's core design point is around the handling and processing of prompts, which we believe are nuanced and opaque user request that require secure handling, intelligent routing, robust observability, and integration with backend (API) systems for personalization – all outside business logic. This requires the use of models and LLMs that are fast, cheap and capable to help developers stay focused on application features. For example, Arch uses (fast) purpose-built LLMs for jailbreak detection, converts prompts into API semantics for personalization, and (eventually) automatically routing to the best outbound LLM based on the complexity of a prompt to improve the cost/speed of an app.
We believe #2 will continue to be different and evolve further away from traditional API/HTTP routing that it will require constant invention and work to make the lives of developers easy.
Envoy is legendary in (dev)ops circles, but I don't understand what it lends to the AI space. I feel like building a separate backend service that runs behind envoy would make more sense but that's just me.
We agree Envoy is legendary - and per se doesn't lend anything to the AI space. That's essentially what we are doing here, building on top of Envoy to add capabilities specifically for AI and prompts. For instance, we use Envoy's filtering capabilities to handle and process prompts - this was get to keep all the robustness and security features for TCP/HTTP from Envoy and solve the critical but undifferentiated tasks related to prompts like safety, observability, routing, function calling, etc.
Hey HN - my name is Salman and I am Adil’s Co-Founder. Would love to hear and get feedback. Here is a link to our public roadmap, please lets us know if there are things you’d like for us to work on first
Tetrate and Bloomberg want to contribute their code to Envoy to create "Envoy AI Gateway", similarly to how there is an "Envoy Gateway" spec. Do you see this as being complementary or competitive with your work?
https://tetrate.io/press/tetrate-and-bloomberg-collaborate-o...
It's early days, so while there might be some overlap, I am sure there is a lot that we can do together to build complimentary products.
Based on the press release, its kinda hard to tell exactly how different/alike we will be, but Arch will always be "designed-first" for prompts and LLM application workloads without exposing all Envoy related features. And Envoy is "designed-first" for micro-services application workloads. So there will be some overlap but our design principles will deviate over time I feel. But we are very open to collaborating with the community here...
Hi, I'm curious how preventing jailbreaks protects the user?
> Prompt guardrails to prevent jailbreak attempts and ensure safe user interactions [...]
Untrusted inputs to systems with agency or access to privileged data. Here’s a data exfiltration example in Google AI Studio:
https://x.com/wunderwuzzi23/status/1821210923157098919
That's a fair point - technically it protects the application from malicious attempts to subvert the desired LLM experience. The more specific language (and I think we could do better here) would be that Arch ensures users remain within the bounds of an intended LLM experience. That at least was the intention behind "ensure safe user interactions"...
Jailbreak ensures a smooth developer experience by controlling what traffic from user make its way to the model. With jailbreak (and other guardrails soon to be added) developers can short-circuit response and with observability developers can get insights on how users are interacting with their APIs.
Lately, I have seen few gateways around LLM. Namely, openrouter, portkey.ai, etc.
My key question is, who would be the ideal customer who would need a proxy or a gateway like this? Why couldn't it be an extension or plugin of existing LBs, proxies etc.
Two things
1/ Arch builds on Envoy so that we don't re:invent all the HTTP(s)/TCP level capabilities needed in a modern gateway for applications. So in that sense, we agree with you that it should "extend" something vs. rewriting the whole stack. There are several security and robustness guarantees that we borrow from Envoy as a result of this. To be more specific, a lot of Arch's core implementation today is an Envoy filter written in Rust.
1/ Arch's core design point is around the handling and processing of prompts, which we believe are nuanced and opaque user request that require secure handling, intelligent routing, robust observability, and integration with backend (API) systems for personalization – all outside business logic. This requires the use of models and LLMs that are fast, cheap and capable to help developers stay focused on application features. For example, Arch uses (fast) purpose-built LLMs for jailbreak detection, converts prompts into API semantics for personalization, and (eventually) automatically routing to the best outbound LLM based on the complexity of a prompt to improve the cost/speed of an app.
We believe #2 will continue to be different and evolve further away from traditional API/HTTP routing that it will require constant invention and work to make the lives of developers easy.
Hope this helps!
Envoy is legendary in (dev)ops circles, but I don't understand what it lends to the AI space. I feel like building a separate backend service that runs behind envoy would make more sense but that's just me.
We agree Envoy is legendary - and per se doesn't lend anything to the AI space. That's essentially what we are doing here, building on top of Envoy to add capabilities specifically for AI and prompts. For instance, we use Envoy's filtering capabilities to handle and process prompts - this was get to keep all the robustness and security features for TCP/HTTP from Envoy and solve the critical but undifferentiated tasks related to prompts like safety, observability, routing, function calling, etc.
Hey HN - my name is Salman and I am Adil’s Co-Founder. Would love to hear and get feedback. Here is a link to our public roadmap, please lets us know if there are things you’d like for us to work on first
https://github.com/orgs/katanemo/projects/1
You can also see current list of issues at https://github.com/katanemo/arch/issues, and can also post new feature requests and bug fixes there.