The Architecture of a Self-Hosted AI Gateway
Dev.to AI
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Generative AI
Open Source AI
AI Business
Most tutorials tell you how to set up a tool. This article is about why it's designed the way it is. OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent gateway - a self-hosted system that connects chat platforms to AI models. When I first looked at its architecture, several design decisions stood out as non-obvious. They reflect trade-offs that anyone building AI infrastructure will eventually face. Let me unpack the ones that matter. The Core Constraint: One Gateway Per Host The first thing you notice about OpenClaw's architecture is a hard constraint: one Gateway process per host. No horizontal scaling.