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Vela Context is the new home of FiwareBox and UnsBox. Same platform, sharper focus on the NGSI-LD open standard.
WHY?

VELA TOOLS / SECURITY & COMP

LIBRA

 AVAILABLE

PRODUCTION-READY API GATEWAY AND POLICY ENFORCEMENT FOR NGSI-LD.


LICENSE

FOSS · PRO · HUB

STANDARDS

NGSI-LD

TYPE

GATEWAY + SECURITY

CLUSTER

SECURITY & COMPLIANCE

THE PROBLEM IT SOLVES ​

Context Brokers manage data. They don’t manage who accesses it, how fast, or what happens when things fail. Without LIBRA, every production deployment needs custom auth, caching, rate limiting, and monitoring — built from scratch.


LIBRA is a single gateway that handles all of this. Keycloak integration, tenant-scoped RBAC, smart caching, circuit breaker, and Prometheus metrics — production-ready from day one.

WHAT YOU GET 

SECURE AT THE EDGE
 STAY UP UNDER LOAD
SEE EVERY REQUEST

TECHNICAL DETAILS

  • Validates JWT Bearer tokens against Keycloak JWKS with automatic key rotation and clock skew tolerance.
  • Enforces tenant-scoped RBAC: role format tenant:{name}:{permission} with hierarchy admin > write > read and wildcard (*) support.
  • Propagates identity via X-Auth-Subject, X-Auth-Username, X-Auth-Email, X-Auth-Tenants, X-Auth-Groups, X-Auth-Machine headers.
  • NGSI-LD–aware smart cache: content-type keying, query normalization, per-resource TTL, generational invalidation on mutations.
  • Request deduplication: single-flight pattern — concurrent identical GET/HEAD requests share one backend call.
  • Circuit breaker: opens on repeated backend failures, auto-recovers with backoff, returns 503 while open.
  • Rate limiting: token bucket (Governor) with IP extraction, configurable burst size and refill interval.
  • Security headers: Helmet middleware (CSP, HSTS, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options).
  • RFC 9457 errors: all proxy errors as application/problem+json with LIBRA-namespaced type URIs.
  • Audit logging: structured logs per request (tenant, user identity, method, path, status).
  • Compression: gzip, brotli, deflate, zstd (compile-time feature flags).
  • Prometheus metrics: HTTP request metrics at configurable endpoint, excludes health probes.
  • CORS: permissive, custom (explicit origins/methods/headers), or disabled.
  • Payload limits: configurable max request body size, rejects with 413 Payload Too Large.
  • Multi-tenant policies: require-header, authenticate, or allow-public for NGSI-LD-Tenant handling.
  • Not a Context Broker - it proxies requests to one (Scorpio, Stellio, Orion-LD).
  • Not an identity provider - it validates tokens from Keycloak; user management lives there
  • Not a data transformation engine - it passes NGSI-LD traffic through; mapping/ETL belongs to CASSIOPEIA.
  • Not a full API management platform - no developer portal, API keys, or usage billing; focused on auth + resilience
  • Not a UI-first product - usage is documented mainly via CLI + config files
  • Inputs
    • Client HTTP requests to /ngsi-ld/v1/* (protected) or /api/v1/* (health, ready, info, metrics).
    • Configuration: TOML (libra.toml) or environment variables.
    • Keycloak JWKS endpoint for JWT validation.
  • Processing
    • Global layers: request ID, trace logging, CORS, compression, Prometheus metrics.
    • Protected path: smart cache, request deduplication, Helmet, RFC 9457 error handler, rate limiting, circuit breaker, timeout, payload limit, header sanitization, tenant policy, Keycloak auth, RBAC, audit log, identity propagation.
    • Validates JWT, checks tenant permission against Keycloak roles, injects X-Auth-* headers.
  • Outputs
    • Proxied requests to the upstream Context Broker with identity headers.
    • Health/ready/info/metrics responses for Kubernetes probes and observability.
    • Structured audit logs and Prometheus metrics.

LIBRA sits between clients and your NGSI-LD Context Broker:

  • Upstream Clients (applications, dashboards, services) sending NGSI-LD requests.
  • LIBRA JWT validation, RBAC, caching, circuit breaker, rate limiting, identity propagation.
  • Downstream NGSI-LD Context Broker (Scorpio, Stellio, Orion-LD).
  • Language: Rust
  • Web framework: Axum
  • Config format: TOML
  • Auth: Keycloak JWKS
  • Caching: Moka
  • Rate limiting: Tower Governor
  • Interfaces: CLI (LIBRA...)
  • Observability: Prometheus (axum-prometheus), tracing

GET STARTED

BUILD FOR IT PERSONAS: ARCHITECTS, PLATFORM ENGINEERS, DEVOPS, SRE, AND INTEGRATORS WHO NEED TO STOP HAND-ROLLING BROKER SECURITY - WORKS WITH: ALL VELA TOOLS

three ways to use libra

Open core. Pick the path that matches your stage — from free download to fully managed integration.


OPEN SOURCE

FOSS

Free

Self-hosted

GET ON GITHUB

Full mapping engine


All input formats


CLI + server mode


Community support

RECOMMENDED

COMMERCIAL

PRO

From €100/month

Per instance

Talk to sales

Everything in FOSS


Web Configurator UI


Pre-built starter mappings


Priority support, SLA


Commercial licence


FULL SUITE

hub

From €1,999/month

Vela Context Data Hub

Talk to sales

Everything in Pro


Fully managed


Integrated with broker, gateway, starter packs


10h/month consulting included

Vela Context Data Hub · ANY FORMAT IN, NGSI-LD OUT · EU OPEN STANDARDS · YOUR INFRASTRUCTURE, YOUR RULES