BFE Ingress Controller vs Contour

BFE Ingress Controller is an open-source Layer 7 load balancer derived from Baidu’s proprietary Baidu Front End. It is self-hosted and supports Linux, macOS, Windows, and API use. BFE handles HTTP, HTTPS, SPDY, HTTP/2, WebSocket, TLS, gRPC, and FastCGI traffic; HTTP/3 is planned. Operators define content-based routing rules with a domain-specific language. Traffic features include global and distributed load balancing, zone-aware balancing, resilience to zone-level failures, and overload protection. Each tenant has an isolated configuration that is not visible to other tenants. A built-in plugin framework supports extensions for traffic management, security, and observability. For operations, BFE provides subsystem metrics, troubleshooting and analysis logs, and distributed tracing. The project lists integrations with mainstream Layer 4 load balancers and ecosystem projects such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, Jaeger, and Fluentd. It is licensed under Apache 2.0 and is a CNCF sandbox project. Documentation covers installation from source and through binary, Go, Snap, and Docker paths. The open-source plan is free.

Contour is a free, self-hosted, open-source Kubernetes ingress controller that provides the control plane for the Envoy edge and service proxy. It supports Kubernetes Ingress v1, its HTTPProxy custom resource and Gateway API. Contour updates ingress configuration dynamically with minimal dropped connections and supports multiple configuration types in clusters used by multiple teams. It can run as a Kubernetes deployment or daemonset, and administrators can delegate access to wildcard certificates. Documented security features include TLS termination, client authorization, rate limiting, JWT verification and IP filtering. Contour and Envoy expose metrics that Prometheus can scrape, and documentation includes guides for cert-manager, Gatekeeper and AWS Network Load Balancer. The project is tested with Kubernetes 1.21 and later and is intended for both cluster administrators and application developers. Community support is available through the project's GitHub page, where users can report issues or ask questions. Contour is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation incubating project; its documentation includes a threat model, a security reporting process and a security fix checklist.