HAProxy Reviews

We are using HAProxy for load balancing.

The most valuable feature of HAProxy is that its open source.

HAProxy could improve by making the dashboards easier to use, and better reports and administration tickets.

I have been using HAProxy for approximately eight years.

HAProxy is stable.

The scalability of HAProxy is good.

We have approximately 10 servers utilizing this solution.

Our organization is an enterprise, but we are using HAProxy for the basic requirements and functions. We are using the basic requirements for load balancing. I would recommend this solution for small businesses. For large businesses, I would recommend Citrix and F5.

If we have any issues generally we open a ticket through the internet, and we receive a solution. They have been responsive.

The support could improve by providing better documentation. If they had an online knowledge base it would be helpful.

I rate the support from HAProxy a three out of five.

We used F5 in 2018 and it was a better solution than HAProxy, but it was expensive. In order to have the best features, you need to pay for a better solution, HAProxy is free.

The deployment and configuration of HAProxy are not easy if we compare it with other solutions, such as F5. The full implementation took us one to two months to complete.

I rate the initial setup of HAProxy a three out of five.

We did the implementation of HAProxy in-house.

We have one or two people who maintain HAProxy. They do the administration, testing, and all other maintenance. We did not require any third parties. The solution requires maintenance approximately three times annually. However, we are not using the solution extensively.

HAProxy is a free open-source solution.

The main difference between HAProxy and other solutions on the market is that it is open source. Otherwise, functional-wise, it's the same.

I rate HAProxy a seven out of ten.

I use it for managing Redis clusters where I have a front-end for a read-write and a front-end for a read-only. I have no idea who else in my company uses it. I had opted to use this because we have silos in our company. We have a network silo that does the load balancing, and I wanted to control how these tests worked with the load balancing. I wanted them to do load balancing where they hand off like a TCP Fast Open. They perform a check on these services with TCP Fast Open.

For example, there is one free HAProxy service for each node, and they use TCP Fast Open for things like that. It's flipped to the HAProxy, and then they establish a persistent connection. It's more of a hand-off, and then I can do all the magic. You can do most of the things I'm doing with HAProxy in F5 too. However, it's siloed off and takes a long time to get things done. I don't have any agility. I took that upon myself with HAProxy because it's a lot quicker to do it myself instead of waiting weeks for somebody else to do it.

The most valuable thing for me is TCP/IP Layer 4 stuff you can do with HAProxy. You can go down to the protocol level and make decisions on something. 

The logging is pretty hard to understand, but the documentation for the logging is decent. That would be my only criticism. Sometimes it's challenging to get through the log, and you need a log to understand what is going on. It isn't easy to map the logging with the documentation, and every time I read the log, I have to pull out the documentation to understand what I'm reading.

And there is some more functionality that I would like to see. For example, you'll do a TLS to the front leg— whatever connects to your load balancer. You do the HTBS or whatever TLS connection there. And then, on the back end, you usually have to clear it a lot of times. I want to be able to do TLS all the way through on both legs. I don't know if it can do that. HAProxy might be able to do this already, but I haven't done enough research to see if this is possible

Probably about two years now.

HAProxy is rock solid. I'm pleased with it.

HAProxy is scalable. It easily handles the current loads, but my connections are pretty low. It can take a lot more than what I'm doing. I'm making around 200 connections per second, which doesn't put much stress on the solution. HAProxy can handle it pretty easy.

I've never used any tech support. I just use the freeware.

The setup was pretty straightforward. When I started using HAProxy, I played around with it in a container and built from source, so I got a good feel for what it could do. And then I picked up a book called Load Balancing With HAProxy. After I read that, I felt confident I could use this service in a production setting. I was able to tune the knobs I needed to adjust and understand things pretty well. The book is pretty decent, but I wouldn't mind seeing a newer version of it. It was helpful. 

The HAProxy documentation on the web isn't bad, but the book is much nicer for me. I like to see how the authors apply HAProxy to specific use cases and leverage things. Also, they explain how to do something, whereas the documentation only tells you about the features and parameters. Sometimes it's hard for the documentation to show the importance of a feature and express how to do what you want. 

I'm using the freeware version. I have no idea if there is a paid solution because I've never looked into it. I might in the future if I have a use case for it. But right now, I'm leveraging the free version, and it seems to fit well in this stack because I'm using the free Redis.   

I would rate HAProxy nine out of 10. My biggest recommendation for any new HAProxy user is to read Load Balancing With HAProxy by Nick Ramirez. If you're thinking about using HAProxy and you want to get your feet wet, read this book and follow along with it. Determine whether you're trying to do an HAProxy for a web service or something else and concentrate specifically on those pieces. I read the whole book and enjoyed it, but you can focus on one thing if you need to. This book is short, and you can just read the whole thing to understand it.

We use the open source version in our dev environments, and the commercial product for production and pre-production. Our primary use case is for reverse proxy, especially for switches in the different environments. I am a system engineer. 

The solution is user-friendly, works quickly and efficiently. 

I'd like to see better documentation and preferably a French version as well. The product is used a lot here and that would be helpful.

I've been using this solution for a year. 

In my previous job we had some stability issues related to configuration and compatibility with other products. It was unstable because of cookie problems. 

We have good scalability. 

The initial setup takes a few minutes. We use Terraform to deploy and it's very fast. We have five users in the company. 

I had a look at Nginx for the reverse proxy part but I preferred the typology of the writing of HAProxy.

It's important to define your use case clearly so you can be sure the product corresponds to your needs.

I rate the solution seven out of 10. 

We have the following use-cases for HAProxy:

1. To load-balance dozens of Apache 2.4 Servers mod_proxy. (Internal load-balance Tomcat, Jetty, JBoss app containers, using TCP load-balancing).
2. To load-balance hundreds of MySQL and PostgreSQL databases using TCP load-balancing. We manage inventory of these through Ansible automation.
3. To provide a layer of security (username/passwd) authentication for legacy back-end Web apps that may not have username/passwd implemented yet. Some financial Web apps were created over 15 years ago and focused on reports, files, logs, and market share stats and were written in Perl. We also had a very old Kibana interface to visualize those logs. Such Web apps required HAProxy to tunnel the requests with un/pw authentication.
4. To redirect traffic internally based on /URL to the relevant services (DNS nameserver) and as a gateway to tunnel traffic to customers who explicitly require reverse-IP authentication. The DNS nameserver was a trendsetter that we learned quickly and now cannot live without.

As our traffic began increasing nine years ago, we desperately needed to load-balance TCP requests (for DBs). We originally used round robin on an array[] which stored the IPs of half a dozen DBs. But with HAProxy, we didn't need to maintain such complexity. We later exploited many more features.

The most important features would be the load-balancing of HTTP and TCP requests, according to multiple LB algorithms (busyness, weighted-busyness, round robin, traffic, etc). 

Another important feature that we cannot live without is the username/passwd authentication for legacy systems that had none.

The web stats UI, which provides the status of the health and numbers, could greatly benefit from having a RESTful interface to control the load-balanced nodes. Although there is a hack around the UI (by issuing a POST request to HAProxy with parameters), a RESTful interface would greatly improve the automation process (through Chef and Ansible).

I have deployed over 50 instances of HAProxy over the past 15 years and never encountered any stability issues. Most HAProxy instances have continuously run for over two years until the server required a kernel upgrade.

I have used it for over 10 years. I started using it as a Web application (Tomcat, Apache, JBoss) load-balancer when it had a few stable releases. When I first start using it, HAProxy was primarily used to load-balance HTTP requests. Since we are a B2B company that deals primarily with hotel inventory, IP authentication was a must. Therefore, our customers had single end-points to send and receive RESTful requests. To make this viable, we had to use a central server as a proxy to tunnel out the requests. We will continue to use HAProxy as our entry-point and exit-point of the system.

E2E load balancing of Layer 7 and Layer 4 applications.

Software defined load balancing allows us to dynamically adjust and codify routing decisions. This speeds up development.

Performance and SSL proxy/offloading capability. Compared to nginx it’s a lot cleaner and quicker.

Dynamic update API. More things should be possible to be configured during runtime.

We would like to see dynamic ACL and port update support. Our infrastructure relies on randomly allocated ports and this feature would allow us to update without restarting the process. The ACL add/update would help with some direct routing challenges that currently require us to work around them with a map and static back-ends.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

A+++. Super-quick to respond, and always on target with answers specific to the current issue.

We did use hardware loadbalancing, and still use nginx for some Layer 7 routing challenges. We switched because software defined loadbalancing allows us to dynamically adjust and codify routing decisions. This speeds up development.

The learning curve is small if one is familiar with routing/networking in general, but it takes some time to fully understand the impact of some configuration settings. The support for all major Linux distros makes running and testing a breeze though.

NTLM/F5 hardware, nginx.

Use it for some small, non-critical systems first, get comfy with the stats, and then scale out. Codify your configuration and keep it as simple as the requirements allow.

In some environments we are handling millions of requests per minute in a high-availability HAProxy cluster. I don't know any other free software that can do that, from a performance perspective.

• Reliability. HAProxy is the most reliable product I have ever used.
• It is stable. Period. Will not fail unless you do something wrong.

These features are why I give it a 10 out of 10.

HAProxy running in multiple cores, for example one for HTTP and another for HTTPS, requires the use of "nbproc". So if nbproc = 2, you will have two processes of HAProxy running. However, the stats of HAProxy are not aggregated, meaning you don't really know the collective status in a single point of view. Each process has its own socket and it's up to you to aggregate them, and then your stats become less accurate.

Also, having multiple HAProxy nodes in High Availability mode requires the use of clustering software such as Pacemaker and Corosync which are very complex.

Yes, I have encountered issues, but they are always related to configuration, OS settings, network.

Yes, there have been issues with scalability, but that's because of other software configuration such as OS settings, network.

We don't use commercial support.

I used appliances such as Alteon (Radware) which are not as good and do not support all the features required in our environment.

Setting up an HAProxy is simple, however to run it in production you have to do a lot of tweaking.

There is no pricing for HAProxy. There are other HAProxy paid products (support/appliances) but we haven't used them so far.

Only lately, nginx has introduced an advanced "proxy" product. It is okay, but HAProxy is better in terms of performance and stability.

• Use the best hardware you can (CPU and memory).
• Don't log files locally, if possible.
• Use multi process only if you have to, and don't utilize the first core.

We are just using this product in our UAT environment.

Load balancing is valuable, and we are also using the WAF feature.

It is a complete open-source product. The good thing is that there is a lot of customization and development.

There is no standardized document available. So, any individual has to work from scratch to work it out. If some standard deployment details are available, it would be helpful for people while deploying it. There should be more documentation on the standard deployment.

When you have to customize it for your application requirements, there are a lot of challenges. There should be more support for customization. To customize it better, there should be some kind of programming integration.

I have been using this solution for two and a half years.

It is completely open-source, so updates come very frequently. To the most extent, it is stable.

It is an open-source product, so you have to work on technical support. You can take premium support from HAProxy, and that helps a lot, but it is not comparable to other enterprise products because it is a free-of-cost product.

I also use F5. I am looking to replace F5 with HAProxy for some of my non-critical applications.

HAProxy is open source. So, if you have cost concerns, you can go for it. It is good for basic application load balancing. If you don't have budget limitations or you have critical applications, you should definitely go for F5 because of the standardization and the product experience they have in handling mission-critical applications. 

Its initial setup is easy and not very complex. If you have a general understanding of how containers and VMware work, it is not very problematic to deploy it.

The initial setup documentation of HAProxy is good, but when you have to customize it for your application requirements, it gets difficult.

It is free of cost.

We have currently deployed it for one product. For non-critical applications, it is a good choice. You can definitely go for it if you have cost concerns, your application is not very dynamic, or you are looking for a basic load balancing product. 

I would rate HAProxy a six out of 10.

Our primary use for this solution is to mount service for Redis.

It made something possible where I do load balancing on a container, without having to configure it at the firewall.

The most valuable feature is the TCP load balancing. It solves a problem for me where I can build files, not based on the health of the check, but rather the speed of the check. I found that functionality to be quite useful.

The logging functionality could use improvement, as it is a little cryptic. Additional logging functionality with better documentation would be helpful.

I'm quite happy with the frequency in which new versions and updates come out. Each release either adds some functionality or fixes some bugs, from what I've seen. I've upgraded the HAProxy probably ten times now, and have never had an issue.

I have never had to use the solution's technical support.

I found that the setup was pretty straightforward, although I had read a book on HAProxy before I started the project. I had given it some thought in terms of what it was that I wanted to do. The book that I read was good, and it was easy for me to install the product.

Only one person is required for deployment and maintenance.

We are not paying for HAProxy support. We're using the free version, compiling it in a container, and using it. The only cost is for the image manager, who is responsible for uploading the image, and that is trivial. 

I chose this solution because I have to operate within a Docker container, and this is the only one that I could get to work.

Once the container is set up, the time it takes to deploy is typically under a minute. That is a full-blown solution with all the plugins and images that I'm planning on using. I'm pretty happy with it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.