Alibaba Cloud’s AI Gateway just got sharper. It now handles real-time overload protection and LLM fallback routing using passive health checks, first packet timeouts, and traffic shaping. It proxies both BYO and cloud LLMs—think PAI-EAS, Tongyi Qianwen—and redirects load spikes or failures on the fly. Fewer drops. Less churn. No frantic restarts.

The bigger play: Traffic handling is no longer just infra hygiene. It’s core intelligence, baked right into the gateway layer—built for the chaos of LLM demand.