BFE Ingress Controller vs F5 BIG-IP Container Ingress Services
BFE Ingress Controller
bfe-networks.net
F5 BIG-IP Container Ingress Services
clouddocs.f5.comSide by side
| Figure | BFE Ingress Controller | F5 BIG-IP Container Ingress Services |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Ingress Controllers | 9.0 (#2) | 7.8 (#10) |
| Observability | Built-in metrics, logs and distributed tracing are provided for operations and troubleshooting. | BIG-IP data streams can export application and network statistics to third-party visibility and analytics tools, with Splunk given as an example. |
| Security | The vendor says BFE is written in Go, a memory-safe language, and describes it as immune to buffer overflow vulnerabilities. | F5 documents securing CIS BIG-IP credentials by storing them in HashiCorp Vault and synchronizing them to a Kubernetes Secret with External Secrets Operator. |
Plans
F5 BIG-IP Container Ingress Services
- Open-source softwareFree
In their own words
BFE Ingress Controller
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.
F5 BIG-IP Container Ingress Services
F5 BIG-IP Container Ingress Services (CIS) connects Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift environments with F5 BIG-IP. It watches Kubernetes resources and adjusts BIG-IP configuration as applications change, while teams manage BIG-IP through Kubernetes or OpenShift command-line interfaces and APIs. CIS can send traffic from BIG-IP to clusters through NodePort or ClusterIP and supports F5 AS3 declarations. It provides HTTP and URI routing, load balancing, scaling, health monitoring, and Blue/Green or A/B traffic handling. F5 documents Ingress resources, OpenShift Routes, IngressLink coordination with NGINX Ingress Controller, and overlays including OpenShift SDN, Flannel, and Calico. BIG-IP data streams can export application and network statistics to tools such as Splunk. Installation is available through Helm or manual methods, with releases on Docker Hub and Red Hat Container Registry. The open-source plan is free, but requires a licensed BIG-IP system, a Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster, and AS3 installed on BIG-IP.