BFE Ingress Controller vs Varnish Gateway

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.

Varnish Gateway has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.