Open Source Load Balancers

Provides rich traffic management features such as load balancing, dynamic upstream, canary release, circuit breaking, authentication, observability, and more. Based on the Nginx library and etcd. Cloud-native microservices API gateway, delivering the ultimate performance, security, open source and scalable platform for all your APIs and microservices. Apache APISIX is based on Nginx and etcd. Compared with traditional API gateways, APISIX has dynamic routing and plug-in hot loading, which is especially suitable for API management under micro-service system. You can use Apache APISIX as a traffic entrance to process all business data, including dynamic routing, dynamic upstream, dynamic certificates, A/B testing, canary release, blue-green deployment, limit rate, defense against malicious attacks, metrics, monitoring alarms, service observability, service governance, etc.

BFE (Beyond Front End) is a modern layer 7 load balancer from baidu. BFE has a builtin plugin framework that makes it possible to develop new features rapidly by writing plugins. BFE is designed to provide every tenant a dedicated share of the instance. Each tenant’s configuration is isolated and remains invisible to other tenants. BFE supports HTTP, HTTPS, SPDY, HTTP2, gRPC, WebSocket, TLS, FastCGI, etc. Future support is planned for HTTP/3. BFE provides an advanced domain-specific language to describe routing rules which are easy to understand and maintain. BFE supports global load balancing and distributed load balancing for zone aware balancing, zone level failure resilience, overload protection etc. BFE provides a rich set of plugins for traffic management, security, observability, etc. BFE includes detailed built-in metrics for all subsystems. BFE writes various logs for trouble shooting, data analysis and visualization. BFE also supports distributed tracing.

Cilium is open-source software for providing, securing and observing network connectivity between container workloads, cloud-native, and fueled by the revolutionary Kernel technology eBPF. Kubernetes doesn't come with an implementation of Load Balancing. This is usually left as an exercise for your cloud provider or in private cloud environments an exercise for your networking team. Cilium can attract this traffic with BGP and accelerate leveraging XDP and eBPF. Together these technologies provide a very robust and secure implementation of Load Balancing. Cilium and eBPF operate at the kernel layer. With this level of context we can make intelligent decisions about how to connect different workloads whether on the same node or between clusters. With eBPF and XDP Cilium enables significant improvements in latency and performance and eliminates the need for kube-proxy entirely.

Envoy is an open source, high-performance edge/middle/service proxy designed for cloud-native applications. It was built by Lyft to solve the common problem of networking and observability when moving to a distributed architecture. Envoy is a proxy designed for single services and applications. Aside from that it is also a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures. It runs right along with every application, and abstracts the network by providing common features in a platform-agnostic manner. With Envoy, visualizing problem areas becomes a lot easier thanks to consistent observability. It also helps with overall performance tuning, and easily adding substrate features in one place.