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How it works: AI Gateway in IBM API Connect software deployments

By Nayak Sanjay posted Tue January 07, 2025 01:08 PM

  

In an earlier post, we announced that AI Gateway feature is available to IBM API Connect on-premises customers also from version 10.0.8.1 onwards, and also in the recently released 10.0.9.0.

This new IBM API Connect feature supports the enabling of the AI Gateway functionality on DataPower API Gateways. Enabling this feature will make the AI Gateway policies available on the DataPower API Gateway. Users can then create a REST proxy that uses the AI Gateway to control access to AI models as per this documentation.

Let me give a quick overview of how to enable this feature in the software deployment of IBM API Connect.

Enable AI Gateway

At a product level, AI Gateway feature is supported on all API Connect form-factors from 10.0.8.1 and 10.0.9.0.

However, each gateway service registered with API Manager needs to be configured to support the AI Gateway capabilities.  After upgrading to one of the above versions, all existing DataPower API Gateway services will have their new 'Enable AI Gateway' property set to false.

A user can then choose to enable AI Gateway feature using Cloud Manager UI on the gateway registration page using the 'Enable AI Gateway' toggle button, shown below in the screenshot of creating a new DataPower API Gateway service. This can also be done by editing an existing gateway service. When a new DataPower API Gateway service is created (a.k.a. registered), the 'Enable AI Gateway' property is set to true by default, it can be set to false if so desired.

The 'Enable AI Gateway' property is also supported by toolkit command-line apic in the gateway-services:create and gateway-services:update commands. The user simply needs to provide the property as follows:

ai_gateway_enabled: true

or 

ai_gateway_enabled: false

When AI Gateway is enabled on a gateway service, a gateway extension containing the AI Gateway policies is automatically configured on the DataPower API Gateway. Once this is done, the AI Gateway policies will be available for you to use in the API Manager's API editor as shown in screenshot below. Note that more policies will be added to the set of AI Gateway policies

Disable AI Gateway

When AI Gateway is disabled on a gateway service, the following happens:

  • The gateway extension containing AI Gateway policies is un-configured from the gateway service.
  • The AI Gateway policies that were not in use by any published API are deleted.
  • The AI Gateway policies that were in use by any published API are not deleted.

Using your own gateway extensions

The AI Gateway policies are configured on the gateway service as gateway extensions. A current limitation, which we expect to remove in a future version, is that it is not possible to turn on the 'Enable AI Gateway' feature on a gateway service that already has a gateway extension configured, and vice-versa, if the AI Gateway is enabled on a gateway service then another gateway extension cannot be automatically configured on it.

For the moment, we support a manual procedure for configuring 'Enable AI Gateway' and your own gateway extension together on a gateway service. The full procedure is documented here, the outline of steps is:

  • Get the AI Gateway extension from API Connect.
  • Merge the AI Gateway extension with your own gateway extension.
  • Update the gateway service with the combined gateway extension.

I hope this gives you a good understanding of how the 'Enable AI Gateway' feature works in API Connect, stay tuned for more updates on this in the near future. Feel free to post any questions or comments.   


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