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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.

agent aware

Real signal across most facets with visible, nameable gaps — the contract exists but is thin, or the portal is good while governance and commercial terms are absent.

Kin Score

API Evangelist profiles BFE the way a machine reads it — 43 machine-readable artifacts across 3 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.

Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — BFE scores 50.1/100 (developing), with a separate agent-readiness read of 39/100 (agent aware). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.

Kin Score

This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
Composite quality — 50.1/100 · developing
Contract Quality 14.8 / 25
Developer Ergonomics 3.5 / 20
Commercial Clarity 7.9 / 20
Operational Transparency 4.8 / 13
Governance 10.4 / 12
Discoverability 8.8 / 10
Agent readiness — 39/100 · agent aware
Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18
Agentic Access Contract 15 / 15
MCP Server 0 / 12
Machine-Readable Auth 0 / 10
Idempotency 0 / 9
Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8
Request/Response Examples 0 / 7
Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7
Typed Event Surface 0 / 6
Agent Skills 0 / 5
Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4
Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

How we profile BFE

Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for BFE. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.

APIs 3

Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

BFE Debug API

Go pprof debugging and profiling endpoints

BFE Monitor API

Monitor metrics and categories for observability

BFE Reload API

Configuration reload operations

Pricing Plans 1

Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Bfe Plans Pricing

3 plans

PLANS

Rate Limits 1

Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Bfe Rate Limits

5 limits

RATE LIMITS

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

Bfe Finops

FINOPS

Features 8

The notable capabilities this provider advertises, captured as structured features so they can be searched and compared instead of read one landing page at a time.

Notable capabilities this provider offers.

Layer 7 Load Balancing

Advanced HTTP/HTTPS/HTTP2 load balancing with pluggable algorithms.

Plugin Framework

Extensible plugin system enabling custom traffic management logic.

Multi-tenancy

Isolated configuration and routing per tenant.

Advanced Routing

DSL-based routing rules for fine-grained traffic control.

Protocol Support

HTTP, HTTPS, SPDY, HTTP/2, gRPC, WebSocket, TLS, FastCGI protocols.

Observability

Built-in metrics, logging, and distributed tracing integration.

Dynamic Configuration

Hot reload of routing and load balancing configuration without restart.

CNCF Sandbox

Hosted as a CNCF sandbox project with active community governance.

Scroll within the panel for all 8 ·

Semantic Vocabularies 1

JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.

JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.

Bfe Context

5 classes · 7 properties

JSON-LD

Spectral Rules 2

Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.

BFE API Rules

5 rules · 4 warnings

SPECTRAL

BFE API Rules

25 rules · 13 errors · 11 warnings

SPECTRAL

JSON Schema 5

Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.

Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.

MonitorCategoriesResponse

1 properties

JSON SCHEMA

MonitorMetricsResponse

2 properties

JSON SCHEMA

ReloadEntriesResponse

1 properties

JSON SCHEMA

ReloadEntry

2 properties

JSON SCHEMA

ReloadResponse

3 properties

JSON SCHEMA

JSON Structure 5

JSON Structure captures the data shapes in a form built for tooling — a complement to JSON Schema that keeps the model machine-legible.

JSON Structure definitions describing this provider's data shapes.

Bfe Monitor Categories Response Structure

1 properties

JSON STRUCTURE

Bfe Monitor Metrics Response Structure

2 properties

JSON STRUCTURE

Bfe Reload Entries Response Structure

1 properties

JSON STRUCTURE

Bfe Reload Entry Structure

2 properties

JSON STRUCTURE

Bfe Reload Response Structure

3 properties

JSON STRUCTURE

Examples 5

Real request and response payloads are what turn a spec from abstract into obvious — and they're one of the twelve things an agent needs to call an API correctly on the first try.

Example request and response payloads for these APIs.

Security Posture 1

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Bfe Domain Security

TLSv1.3

SECURITY

Agentic Access 1

An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Bfe Agentic Access

7 operations

7 operations · 0 acting

AGENTIC

Use Cases 5

What developers actually build with this provider — captured so the catalogue answers 'what is this for', not just 'what does this expose'.

What developers build with this provider.

Enterprise API Gateway

Route and load balance API traffic with per-tenant isolation.

Microservices Traffic Management

Manage east-west and north-south traffic in microservices architectures.

TLS Termination

Terminate TLS/HTTPS at the edge and forward to backend HTTP services.

A/B Testing

Route fractions of traffic to canary deployments using routing rules.

DDoS Mitigation

Use traffic management plugins to detect and mitigate DDoS attacks.

Integrations 4

Pre-built integrations with other platforms tell you where this provider already fits in a stack.

Pre-built integrations with other platforms and tools.

Prometheus

Export metrics to Prometheus for monitoring and alerting.

Kubernetes

Deploy BFE as an ingress controller in Kubernetes clusters.

Docker

Run BFE in Docker containers for containerized deployments.

Grafana

Visualize BFE metrics in Grafana dashboards.

Resources

Every other property we hold for BFE — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.

Get Started 1

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

Documentation 1

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Agent Surfaces 1

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

Design & Contract 2

Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events

Build 2

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

Access & Security 1

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/bfe · machine-readable index on apis.io