When deploying Azure OpenAI in enterprise environments, security and compliance requirements quickly become complex. Direct API calls lack the governance, observability, and safety controls that production applications need. This is where Nexus AI Gateway comes in.
The Problem
Azure OpenAI is powerful, but enterprise deployments require:
- PII Detection: Automatically detect and redact sensitive information before it reaches the model
- Content Safety: Filter harmful or inappropriate content at the API boundary
- Rate Limiting: Prevent abuse and control costs
- Cost Tracking: Real-time visibility into token usage and spending
- Audit Logging: Comprehensive logs for compliance and debugging
The Solution
Nexus AI Gateway is a FastAPI-based proxy that sits between your applications and Azure OpenAI. Built with production readiness in mind, it provides:
Architecture
The gateway uses a middleware pattern to intercept requests, apply security policies, and forward validated requests to Azure OpenAI. Redis powers rate limiting and caching, while Microsoft Presidio handles PII detection.
Key Features
- Real-time PII detection using Microsoft Presidio
- Content safety filtering with Azure Content Safety
- Token-based rate limiting with Redis
- Cost tracking and metrics export to Prometheus
- Comprehensive audit logging
Implementation Highlights
One of the most interesting challenges was implementing efficient PII detection without adding significant latency. By using Presidio's analyzer in async mode and caching common patterns, we kept P95 latency under 50ms.
The gateway is open source and available on GitHub. It's designed to be deployed as a containerized service in Kubernetes, making it easy to integrate into existing infrastructure.
What's Next
Future enhancements include support for streaming responses, multi-tenant isolation, and advanced cost optimization strategies. The goal is to make enterprise-grade AI deployment as simple as possible.