BFE
BFE (Beyond Front End) is an open-source layer 7 load balancer developed by Baidu, providing advanced traffic routing, forwarding, and load balancing capabilities with support for HTTP, HTTPS, HTTP/2, WebSocket, TLS, and gRPC. BFE is a CNCF sandbox project licensed under Apache 2.0.
APIs
BFE Management API
The BFE Management API provides internal monitoring metrics, configuration reload, and Go pprof profiling endpoints. This API should only be exposed on internal networks.
Capabilities
BFE Load Balancer Management
Workflow capability for managing BFE load balancer operations including runtime metrics collection, configuration hot reload, and observability for infrastructure and platform e...
Run with NaftikoFeatures
Advanced HTTP/HTTPS/HTTP2 load balancing with pluggable algorithms.
Extensible plugin system enabling custom traffic management logic.
Isolated configuration and routing per tenant.
DSL-based routing rules for fine-grained traffic control.
HTTP, HTTPS, SPDY, HTTP/2, gRPC, WebSocket, TLS, FastCGI protocols.
Built-in metrics, logging, and distributed tracing integration.
Hot reload of routing and load balancing configuration without restart.
Hosted as a CNCF sandbox project with active community governance.
Use Cases
Route and load balance API traffic with per-tenant isolation.
Manage east-west and north-south traffic in microservices architectures.
Terminate TLS/HTTPS at the edge and forward to backend HTTP services.
Route fractions of traffic to canary deployments using routing rules.
Use traffic management plugins to detect and mitigate DDoS attacks.
Integrations
Export metrics to Prometheus for monitoring and alerting.
Deploy BFE as an ingress controller in Kubernetes clusters.
Run BFE in Docker containers for containerized deployments.
Visualize BFE metrics in Grafana dashboards.