About

Velvet is a gateway for engineers to build AI features with confidence. The platform enables developers to analyze, evaluate, and monitor AI models in production. “We make it easy to monitor and optimize LLMs in production with a dedicated database, proxy, and gateway. It’s a seamless developer experience, taking less than 5 minutes to get set up. ” – Emma Lawler (Founder, Velvet) Velvet is customizable for each unique application, supporting both hosted and custom deployments. It’s just 2 lines of code to get started, learn more at usevelvet.com.

How they use Cloudflare: Cloudflare Workers is at the heart of Velvet's architecture, serving as the backbone for each customer's dedicated gateway. They use Hono (web application framework) to integrate with Cloudflare Workers, enabling a seamless and scalable experience for customers. "Hono and Workers give us the perfect balance of performance, flexibility, and ergonomics. Hono’s ability to run on various runtimes and its seamless integration with Cloudflare products—like Workers, Queues, and KV—makes it easy to build resilient, scalable gateways." – Chris Hendel (CTO, Velvet)

Cloudflare Workers KV, the highly performant and durable key-value store, serves as the caching layer for Velvet's gateway. With caching enabled, customers enjoy lightning-fast responses from LLMs and save on AI inference costs.

Velvet uses Cloudflare Queues for asynchronous tasks, batch data ingestion, and error handling to process data efficiently and handle traffic surges reliably.

To surface analytics, Velvet integrates with Cloudflare Workers Analytics Engine. This powerful tool enables their users to run granular queries on LLM usage, cost, and performance.

Velvet's infrastructure was put to the test when one of their customers quickly scaled to 10 million requests in just a few days. In response, the team switched to Cloudflare Hyperdrive to manage each customer’s database at scale. Hyperdrive enables Velvet to handle spikes in traffic, ensuring each AI gateway remains consistent and resilient. Cloudflare Workers, Hono, Workers KV, Queues, Analytics Engine, and Hyperdrive products help Velvet deliver robust and scalable AI infrastructure.

Why Cloudflare? Chris Hendel had previously used Cloudflare for CDN and DNS when working on prior projects. Before adopting Cloudflare, the team experienced cost overruns and scalability issues when depending on alternate providers.

"Cloudflare wasn’t just a cost decision—it was a strategic one. The platform’s global network, reliability, and developer-first products have become integral to how we build and scale." – Chris Hendel (CTO, Velvet)

Switching to Cloudflare significantly reduced costs and boosted platform reliability.