BFE

Judgement

What it is

Building block

What it does

A layer 7 load balancer from Baidu with a rule-based routing language, multi-tenancy and modules for rewriting, rate limiting and access control.

Adopt it when

You need a programmable layer 7 load balancer in Go and are not tied to nginx, Envoy or HAProxy.

Watch out

It is a CNCF sandbox project with little adoption outside Baidu and a small English-speaking community.

Ready for

Usable

Runs as

Self-hosted server

Built with

Go

How established

Established: started 7 years ago, latest release v1.8.9.1.

What the license allows

You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.

Judged on 2026-11-06 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Built from

Follow it down: BFE → Go → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

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