Proxed.AI Gets a Major Upgrade: Enhanced Proxy & Global Multi-Region Hosting with Fly.io (Coming Soon!)

We've been hard at work refining the core of Proxed.AI, and we're thrilled to share some significant upgrades to our proxy service. But that's not all – we're also preparing for a massive leap in performance and reliability by bringing Proxed.AI to a global multi-region infrastructure, powered by Fly.io!

(Note: Multi-region hosting on Fly.io is currently in testing and will be available soon. The proxy enhancements are live now for self-hosted instances and will roll out to our current hosted version shortly.)

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Core Proxy Enhancements: More Robust & Resilient

Our API proxy is the heart of Proxed.AI, ensuring your AI requests are secure, authenticated, and correctly routed. We've implemented several key improvements under the hood:

1. Smarter Header Management:

   • We've refined how headers are handled when proxying requests to upstream AI providers like OpenAI and Anthropic.
   • A new centralized proxy-headers.ts utility now intelligently sanitizes request headers, blocking a comprehensive list of potentially problematic or sensitive headers (e.g., Host, platform-specific ones like cf-connecting-ip, x-vercel-id) while ensuring essential ones are passed through or correctly overridden.
   • Response headers are also filtered, forwarding only a curated list of ALLOWED_RESPONSE_HEADERS to your client, reducing clutter and potential information leakage.

2. Advanced Base Proxy Handler (base-proxy.ts):

   • Automatic Retries: The new baseProxy function implements robust retry logic with exponential backoff and jitter for transient errors (like 429s, 502s, 503s, 504s), making your integrations more resilient.
   • Configurable Timeouts: Requests now have configurable timeouts managed by an AbortController.
   • Detailed Error Logging: Failed requests and retries are logged with more context for easier debugging.
   • Standardized Metrics: Latency and retry counts are consistently captured.

3. Centralized Provider Configuration (provider-config.ts):

   • All provider-specific settings (base URLs, retry strategies, timeouts, required headers, auth header construction) are now managed in one place.
   • This makes it easier to add new AI providers in the future and ensures consistent behavior.
   • Configurations are now loaded using new typed environment variable helpers (env.ts) for better startup validation and clarity.

4. Enhanced Request Validation (request-validation.ts):

   • Our requestValidation middleware has been beefed up to check for more potential security issues, including suspicious header values (e.g., containing newlines) and potential request smuggling attempts by checking for conflicting Transfer-Encoding and Content-Length headers.

5. Comprehensive Metrics Collection (metrics.ts):

   • We've introduced a MetricsCollector utility to track request counts, error rates, and latency histograms.
   • These metrics are exportable (currently logged, with a /metrics endpoint for development) and provide crucial observability into your proxy's performance.

These updates make the self-hosted version of Proxed.AI even more secure, reliable, and observable.

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Coming Soon: Global Low-Latency with Fly.io Multi-Region Hosting

While the proxy enhancements are exciting, we're taking an even bigger step to elevate the Proxed.AI experience: multi-region hosting on Fly.io!

Fly.io allows us to deploy Proxed.AI instances in multiple regions around the world, bringing the proxy physically closer to your users and the AI providers.

What does this mean for you?

• Reduced Latency: By routing your requests through a Proxed.AI edge server nearest to your users, we can significantly cut down round-trip times. This is especially crucial for interactive AI applications where every millisecond counts.
• Higher Availability: A multi-region setup inherently provides better fault tolerance. If one region experiences issues, traffic can be dynamically routed to healthy instances.
• Read Replicas for Databases: Our database architecture is designed to leverage Fly.io's support for read replicas. This means read-heavy operations (like fetching project configurations) can be served from a database replica close to the edge server, further speeding up requests and reducing load on the primary database. We've implemented smart "read-after-write" consistency for our database connections.
• Global Scale: As your user base grows worldwide, Proxed.AI will be there to serve them efficiently.

We are currently rigorously testing this new infrastructure to ensure it meets our high standards for performance and reliability. Expect a full announcement with details on availability and how to leverage this new global network soon!

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Why These Changes Matter

• For Self-Hosters: The proxy enhancements provide a more production-ready, secure, and observable core that you can deploy with greater confidence. The new configuration options offer more control.
• For Future Hosted Plan Users: The Fly.io migration will translate to a faster, more reliable managed service, making Proxed.AI an even more compelling solution for hassle-free, secure AI integration.

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What's Next?

1. Rollout to Hosted Version: The core proxy enhancements will be rolled out to our existing hosted infrastructure shortly.
2. Fly.io Multi-Region Launch: We'll announce the official availability of our Fly.io-powered global network as soon as testing is complete.
3. Updated Documentation: We're updating our documentation to reflect these new features and provide guidance on best practices.

We're committed to providing the most secure, reliable, and developer-friendly AI proxy solution. These updates are a significant step in that direction.

Stay tuned for more news on the Fly.io launch! As always, check out our GitHub repository and follow us on X (formerly Twitter) for the latest updates.