HAProxy Reviews

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.

I have found HAProxy's flexibility to be most valuable. HAProxy is highly customizable and will meet the business demands of most companies. It comes with plenty of load balancing algorithms and can act as a forward and reverse proxy.

HAProxy has assisted us with bringing legacy systems in compliance with third party security requirements.

The documentation is extremely detailed, but I think it could be restructured so it isn't so daunting for beginners.

We have been using HAProxy in production for four months.

None, so far.

None, so far.

None, so far.

The customer service is great. I haven't had to open many service requests, but for the few I have opened, support has always responded quickly.

Out of 1-10, a definite 10.

We currently use F5 load balancers for our environment and we hope to switch to HAProxy in the very near future.

Configuring our forward proxy was a little complex because it was my first time implementing such a solution. That being said, the people at HAProxy were more than willing to help me get the solution in place.

Not applicable.

Undetermined at this time.

Compared to solutions such as F5, Haproxy is much cheaper upfront and in yearly licensing fees.

We looked at NGINX and Squid.

The solution is used for high availability. We use it for the backend to distribute the load.

We needed a simple proxy system that is open source. HAProxy was the most used tool for any issues that we ran into. We did not want to use something that was not used much so that we could fix the issues that came up.

The solution is effective in managing our traffic. The integrations work fine. It's a load balancer. There's no need for complex integration. We hit it, and it balances the load in the servers that we assigned to it.

The product has the basic foundations of any load-balancing product. It is simple and basic. The product does not have any new technologies.

I have been using the solution for a few years.

The tool seems very stable. I have not heard of the infrastructure team having any issues with it.

The tool is scalable. We have everything we need.

The product is open source.

There are better tools, but the product does the job well. All my colleagues know the tool and have used it. I recommend the product to others. Companies that have complex environments must not choose HAProxy. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Load-balancing between hosting sites, using Level 4 and Level 7 (with proxy-protocol, depending on the requirements).

It makes the hosting on multiple platforms/datacenters very easy, without having to worry about the high availability required by our customers.

The anti-DDOS PacketShield filtering solution (embedded in the physical appliances) as well as the BGP route injection are great features and heavily used.

The firmware upgrades are extremely easy, fast and convenient. You only have to upload it and reboot. It is as fast and easy to roll back to the previous version.

These features are really an advantage over a "homemade" solution.

The basic clustering is not usable in our very specific setup. The clustering is mainly a configuration replication and is great in a case of active-passive usage. In the case of an active-active (or with more than two nodes) where the configuration is not fully identical, it cannot be used as-is.

We did encounter some stability bugs, but all were ironed out diligently by support.

No scalability issues, ever.

Excellent so far. We have always been able to deal with any problem, quickly and efficiently.

We used something else a long time ago. The old solution wasn't addressing our needs.

Straightforward, but received some help for the migration.

Very good value for the money. One of the simplest licensing schemes in this category of products.

Test/lab virtual machines can be installed without a licence. They can't be used for performance testing but otherwise behave like production nodes.

We are mainly using HAProxy Community Edition on our own servers. We also use this solution depending on our needs, but maintenance and upgrades are more complicated.

Play a lot with the VM version. The product is powerful but some features are a bit hidden (read the HAProxy docs).

Our primary use case for this solution is to perform Layer 7 load balancing/reverse proxying of both our internal and external web applications.

We also use it for SSL offloading, and are beginning to utilize the basic Web Application Firewall functionality of it. 

HAProxy also performs VRRP, for redundancy, in case one of the servers were to go down.

I estimate that this product has saved our company hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in possible downtime from previous load balancers. We make a lot of our money from online sales, so it is critical to have 99.9% uptime.

The ease of use of the configuration, and great documentation, are the most valuable features for us.

The VRRP redundancy is also a mission-critical feature that works seamlessly. I can bring down a server live with minimal downtime because of this.

The only area that I can see needing improvement is the management interface, since it is pretty much all through the CLI or configuration. However, HAProxy does have another product that we evaluated called ALOHA, which has a web front-end, but we found it did not meet our needs.

No stability issues. HAProxy Enterprise Edition has been rock solid. We have essentially had no downtime caused by our load balancers in the last 10 months, because they’ve worked so well. Previously, our load balancers caused us multiple hours per year in downtime. 

I am also able to make configuration changes during the day, in production, with no worries of problems and/or downtime occurring.

No scalability issues, but only because we do not deal with a lot of scale here. We simply rely on an active/passive configuration, so if a load balancer were to fail, we would have a backup instance ready to go.

The technical support has been, in one word, perfect. Every time I call, I’m on the phone with a representative within five minutes who is highly skilled and willing to help, whether in the case of critical issues or simple advice. They always make me feel like I can pick up the phone just to have a good conversation about a new feature, a bug, a "what if" scenario, or anything else.

We previously used Coyote Point load balancers, and then switched to Fortinet’s Application Delivery Controller, due to end-of-life on the Coyote Points. After a few months of major issues involving hours of downtime and slowness, we had to make a decision to move away from Fortinet. We chose HAProxy because of the open-source community behind it, and previous experience with it. We then decided to upgrade to the Enterprise Edition for the support they offer.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. With a minimal configuration, you can get up and going quickly. However, it is very easy to modify the configuration to meet any requirements you may have, and reload in production with no downtime. The only complex part is having to maintain the base operating system, as HAProxy EE is simply a Linux package. The hardening of the operating system was done by myself since there is no appliance, like their ALOHA offering.

The price is well worth it. HAProxy Enterprise Edition paid for itself within months, simply due to the resiliency it brings. It was a bit more expensive than we were originally interested in paying, but we are thankful we chose to go with HAProxy.

We did not evaluate any other options. We considered looking at Barracuda’s offerings, but after a few days of evaluating HAProxy, we decided that it would be the best fit for us.

I would rate this product a nine out of 10. I only took off one point because of the lack of a GUI, although in this case I would say that I prefer the CLI and configuration, which is primarily how we manage it. A GUI/web interface could be helpful for users who are not as experienced in the Linux shell.

Be sure you are familiar with the Linux command line and have networking knowledge. Specifically, VRRP is helpful to understand the high-availability aspect of it. The documentation is very helpful, so be sure to follow their given best practices and configuration tips.

Carers ACT operates a Skype for Business based call centre, which requires the use of a load balancer and reverse proxy for HTTP traffic for the front-end pools. HAProxy is able to fulfill both of these requirements.

In addition to these basic functions outlined above, Carers ACT also requires high availability and ease of configuration. HAProxy fulfills these additional requirements through providing high availability through VRRP and configuration synchronisation.

One of the core services that Carers ACT provides carers within the ACT region is both an advisory and respite support telephone service. Carers use this service to be connected to services, access both advice and support, as well as accessing respite services to assist them in their caring role. The Carers ACT Skype for Business implementation is being progressively re-architected to remove single points of failure, of which the load balancing role was one.

Carers ACT is also exploring innovative approaches to delivering services to carers who are unable to physically attend events, such as live streaming and providing online face to face contact. These new approaches are likely to be supported by the Carers ACT Skype for Business infrastructure. The implementation of the HAProxy load balancing solution will allow Carers ACT to begin to deliver these new services.

Under a month.

No. Carers ACT deployed a pair of clustered ALOHA Load Balancers and were able to migrate from our existing load balancing solution in under a week.

No.

No. The implementation that Carers ACT undertook is focused on reliability over scalability. The throughput required is low, but reliability requirements are high.

From initial approach to the donation of licenses to Carers ACT was a short and a pleasant experience. HAProxy appear to have a solid customer service team who are able to escalate quickly and appropriately.

Carers ACT did not require technical support during our deployment.

Yes. As a non-profit charitable organisation, Carers ACT aims to reduce costs where possible to enable finances to be redirected to services for clients as far as possible. A reduction in overhead allows for an increase in value for our clients.

Carers ACT was facing a significant renewal cost for our existing load balancer solution, and approached HAProxy who generously offered a donation of this product for our use.

HAProxy is definitely a power-user tool. It is enormously scalable and flexible, but this can come at the cost of usability. For anything other than a simple topology, editing configuration files rather than using graphical tools will be required.

This, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing, but rather for the scenarios that HAProxy excels, an administrator should have intimate knowledge of their environment and have undertaken appropriate planning. The ability to have very low-level access to configuration within each load balancer allows for configuration and deployments that could be limited by GUI configuration tools.

In-house.

Instant due to the donation of licensing from HAProxy.

Yes. HAProxy was chosen as it met our needs and because of the generous donation of an HA license pair by the HAProxy team.

I use HAProxy for individuals who can not buy low balancers. I built NFV in a box and send individuals a pathway into an HAProxy VM.

I would like to see better search handling, and a user interface, with a complete functional graphical unit.

I have been using HAProxy for the past four to five months.

I do not have it in a full production environment to have those statistics. What I am currently using is stable.

I do not see enough traffic to make an honest critique of the stability.

I have not currently used technical support.

HAProxy potentially has a good return on investment.

The setup was not difficult it usually takes a day to complete for a VPC.
When it comes to pricing HAProxy is free.

I did look at NGINX.

I would rate HAProxy an eight out of ten.

The heavily tuned full stack (NIC, kernel, and user space) produces excellent performance. Their support is available for advanced troubleshooting.

We have been able to achieve extremely high performance load balancing in a short amount of time. As an example, using L4 mode, we routinely return more than 100 gigabytes per second of MySQL traffic, from a cluster of about 10 replicas.

The GUI is clunky and the on-board metric viewing solution is poor. We ship metrics off the appliance to InfluxDB (using CollectIT, which is bundled with the appliance), to view them directly with Grafana.

We have used this solution for around five years.

During our seven years with these appliances, we have found some problems, typically under very extreme conditions. In each case, the issue was quickly escalated to a team led by the CTO at Aloha.

During one of these cases, they found three separate OpenSSL bugs, and one of them was not previously reported. We also moved to using Intel NICs. Our initial batch of appliances had a different manufacturer, which struggled when pushed to the line rate.

Full layer 7 SSL termination is limited to a single core, which is a problem. We have worked around it terminating SSL on the back-ends, but this is not ideal.

Technical support is truly exceptional. The initial layer is highly technical, and can reproduce problems and provide details. Serious issues are quickly escalated to the senior R&D team.

We have moved all of our basic load balancing onto these devices. We previously used Citrix NetScalers, which were expensive, harder to configure, and more challenging to troubleshoot.

The initial setup was trivial.

Compared to the others in the market, such as Citrix and F5, the cost per performance for Aloha appliances is extremely low. In our experience, the performance and reliability is better.

We strongly prefer to go with Open Source solutions. We evaluated https://www.loadbalancer.org/ as well. We went with Aloha because of the in-house expertise that Aloha has. The primary developer of HAProxy works there.

Go for it. These systems are exceptional.