Data Residency Matrix
What reaches an API7-hosted Hybrid Cloud control plane versus what stays in your own environment, compared against the On-Premises and AISIX OSS deployment options.
Applies to:AISIX AI Gateway 1.4.0
Roles:Security engineerPlatform engineer
Every AISIX deployment option keeps live AI traffic in your own environment — the control plane, wherever it runs, is a management path, not a proxy in the request path. What differs by deployment option is which supporting data leaves your environment at all, and where it goes. This page is the matrix a data-residency or vendor-risk review asks for.
For the deployment options themselves, start with AISIX Products and Deployment Options. This page assumes you already know which option you run and focuses on the data flow underneath it.
What Never Leaves Your Environment
In every deployment option — AISIX OSS, On-Premises, and Hybrid Cloud alike — the following stay inside the infrastructure where you run the gateway:
- Prompt and completion content. The gateway calls your configured model provider directly from your environment. The control plane is not in that call path and does not receive request or response bodies by default.
- Model provider credentials in plaintext. AISIX Enterprise stores provider secrets envelope-encrypted and returns them from no read endpoint; see Credential Handling. For AISIX OSS, you supply credentials to the gateway process yourself and nothing is sent anywhere at configuration time.
The one deliberate exception is a guardrail or embedding-model call you configure: some guardrails send matched content to a third-party content-safety vendor to get a decision, and semantic screening sends candidate text to whichever embedding provider you configured. See Third-Party Guardrail Data Flow for exactly which providers receive what — that is a separate data flow from anything described below, driven by guardrail configuration rather than deployment option.
AISIX OSS (Open-Source Gateway)
There is no control plane, so there is nothing to compare against a data-residency question: you configure the gateway with a resources.yaml file you author and store, and the gateway does not report telemetry to API7. Whatever observability data leaves the gateway process is whatever you configure through your own observability exporters.
On-Premises (Self-Hosted Control Plane)
You deploy the AISIX Enterprise control plane in your own infrastructure, including fully air-gapped environments — see On-Premises Installation. Configuration, credentials, usage telemetry, and audit events all stay inside infrastructure you operate, in the PostgreSQL database you provision. Nothing described in this section reaches API7 unless you separately choose to send it, for example by filing a support bundle.
Hybrid Cloud (AISIX Cloud, API7-Hosted Control Plane)
API7 hosts and operates the control plane; you run the gateways in your own environment and connect them to it — see AISIX Enterprise. The following categories of data reach the API7-hosted control plane:
| Data category | Reaches the control plane? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Prompt and completion content | No | The gateway calls providers directly; see What Never Leaves Your Environment above. |
| Resource configuration (models, routing policy, guardrail policy, budgets) | Yes | You author it through the dashboard or the AISIX Enterprise Admin API; the control plane stores it and projects it to your connected gateways. |
| Provider and caller credentials | Yes, encrypted | api_key is write-only and encrypted before storage; see Credential Handling. The control plane holds the encrypted value, never a plaintext copy it can read back. |
| Usage and cost telemetry | Yes | Gateways report usage events for cost accounting, budgets, and dashboards; see How AISIX Enterprise Works. |
| Request/response body content in usage telemetry | Only if you opt in | Usage telemetry does not carry request or response bodies by default. An observability exporter configured with content_mode: full is the one path that captures body content, and that exporter is a destination you configure — it does not have to be the control plane itself. |
| Audit events (who changed what, when) | Yes | See Logging and Auditing. |
| Gateway health and heartbeat | Yes | Each gateway maintains an outbound mTLS connection to report health and request budget decisions; see Offline Resilience. |
The control plane's own hosting region and any region-pinning options for Hybrid Cloud are account-level details this page does not have a public default to state — confirm your organization's control-plane region and any regional deployment options with your API7 account manager or sales@api7.ai before treating a specific region as settled.
Portable Export Also Carries Configuration and Encrypted Credentials
Independent of the deployment option, Organization Data Export and Import lets you pull a full export of one organization's configuration out of the control plane — a full bundle contains live credentials, still envelope-encrypted, plus the projected gateway documents and the root certificate authority's private key. That export is something you request and download; the control plane does not send it anywhere on its own. Treat a downloaded bundle with the same handling as a database backup, per that page's guidance.
Next Steps
- Compliance and Trust Center — certifications and how to request a Data Processing Agreement covering this data flow.
- Third-Party Guardrail Data Flow — the separate data flow to guardrail vendors, driven by policy rather than deployment option.
- Credential Types Matrix — which credential shape each provider integration uses and how AISIX stores it.