Where an authenticated HTTP relay earns its place

AI agents & tool calls

An agent that can call arbitrary URLs is an agent that can be talked into calling your metadata service. Backfire puts a guard, a key and a log between the model and the network, so a tool call is a bounded act rather than a blind fetch.

User-supplied URLs

The moment your product fetches a URL a user typed, an attacker controls your outbound request. Link previews, feed importers, webhook testers and screenshot tools are the classic SSRF surface — Backfire makes the safe implementation the short one.

Serverless egress

Serverless functions make outbound calls in a dozen places, each with its own timeout, its own error handling and no shared record. Backfire collapses that into one endpoint you can reason about — and one place where third-party credentials and safety checks live.

Webhook delivery

Outbound webhook delivery is outbound HTTP with extra ways to fail: customer endpoints go down, DNS breaks, and every retry needs to be explicable. Backfire gives each attempt a predictable envelope and a log line you can point at when a customer asks what happened.

Data pipelines

Pipelines are bursts: quiet for a week, then a hundred thousand calls during a backfill. Backfire meters the work itself — one trip per completed roundtrip — instead of charging per seat or per month.

Multi-tenant integrations

When every customer brings their own API endpoint, your outbound code becomes a multi-tenant system with a single point of failure. Backfire gives those calls one shape, one safety check and one place to look when a specific customer reports trouble.

MCP servers

An MCP server is a request executor for clients you do not control. The moment one of its tools takes a URL from the model, that URL is attacker input — Backfire keeps the fetch bounded, attributable and logged.

RAG ingestion

Retrieval pipelines fetch whatever a source document happens to link to. That makes every URL in your corpus a potential request to your own metadata service, and every fetch an entry you cannot reconstruct a week later.

Uptime monitoring

A monitor is only useful if its failure modes are boring. Probes fired from a cron job through Backfire share one credential, one timeout policy and one record of what each check actually saw.

Scheduled crawls

A crawl is a loop you leave alone. Backfire gives that loop a fixed request shape, a hard ceiling on each response, and a balance you can predict before scheduling the next run.

Asset pipelines

Asset pipelines fetch URLs chosen by users and partners: an avatar link, a storefront image, a scanned receipt. Each one is an outbound request you did not write and will be asked about later.

Integration tests

Tests that reach real third-party APIs fail for reasons unrelated to your code. A relay gives CI one stable endpoint, one key per pipeline and a record showing exactly what a red build requested.