Solo.io has explained why it built a new gateway instead of extending Envoy. In Designing agentgateway for AI and API Traffic, Lin Sun argues that agents behave like distributed systems — calling tools, routing across models, talking to MCP servers and other agents — and that running a separate AI gateway beside the API gateway duplicates policy, authentication, observability, routing and governance. Agentgateway is one control plane and one Rust data plane for HTTP, gRPC, MCP, A2A and LLM traffic, configured over xDS so routes change without a restart.
The numbers are Solo.io’s. Roughly 500k QPS at 512 connections and under 0.2 ms P99 latency at 30k QPS come from the company’s own benchmarks, with a pointer to John Howard’s Gateway API benchmark for method. Weekly downloads rising from about 100,000 to more than 1 million since February, and more than 7 million in total, are self-reported, as is the list of adopters. What survives without the marketing is the governance record, which is checkable: created in March 2025, donated to the Linux Foundation on August 25, 2025, proposed to the Agentic AI Infrastructure Foundation on April 8 and approved by its Governing Board on May 21 as a Growth-stage project. The architectural point also stands on its own: “Not because existing API gateways are broken. And not because AI traffic somehow replaces traditional application traffic.”
The catalog record for Solo.io names agentgateway in its description, but none of its 15 API pages describe it. They describe Gloo Portal: the Solo.io API Products API, Solo.io Subscriptions API, Solo.io API Keys API and Solo.io OAUTH Credentials API — exactly the consumer-side controls the post says should be unified. The one page that touches AI traffic is the Solo.io Webhooks API, a guardrail webhook contract with a request hook and a response hook that the AI gateway calls out to.
The Kin Score is 60.2, strong, on developer ergonomics at 78.6, discoverability at 76.7 and contract quality at 64.5, with contract governance at 28.0. Agent Readiness is 34.8 with the MCP server, error semantics and OpenAPI examples lit, and agent card, delegated identity and protected resource metadata unlit. That last group is the interesting one. A gateway built to sit between agents and MCP servers is the natural place to answer delegated identity and protected resource metadata, and Solo.io’s own published surface answers neither. Agentgateway is configured, not called, so its absence from the API pages is a fact about what it is. The unlit identity dimensions are a fact about what Solo.io publishes.