HAProxy Reviews

In my previous company, we had a lot of connections with carriers and we had this communication centralized with HAProxy. We had a high-availavility environment with HAProxy, and Keepalived too for database connections.

We were able to use HAProxy for round robin with our databases, or for a centralized TCP connection in one host.

Round robin and monitoring.

From my point of view, the configuration should be more friendly, perhaps with a Web interface. For example, I work with the ClusterControl product for Severalnines, and we have a Web interface to deploy the HAProxy load-balancer.

I am using HAProxy on a live production Web Server (Apache load balancing). It's a very good open-source solution.

Four to five years back, we were struggling with Web load-balancing; we were facing issues with a single Apache. We got the best, and open-source, solution.

Load balancing, mainly. We are using two Apaches with HAProxy load-balancing.

Some people use HAProxy to load balance MySQL databases as well.

They should introduce one feature that I know many people, including me, are waiting for: HAProxy should have provide hot-swipe for back-end servers, no downtime while shifting back-end servers.

They also need a more detailed GUI for monitoring and configuration.

I have been using this solution for the last four to five years with no downtime.

No issues with scalability.

Easy to set up.

If you don't have expertise then go with the licensed version. Otherwise, open-source is the best solution.

I will always give HAProxy a 10 out of 10. We never have any downtime with it. The HAProxy team regularly updates the product. I would definitely recommend HAProxy. You must go with this product.

Proxying the requests for our API to a number of back-ends. We are using it in Linux with Keepalived to ensure high availability.

It has allowed us to evenly distribute the load across a number of servers, and check their health and automatically react to errors. It also allows us to do graceful reloads, so not a single request is lost.

• Performance
• Stability
• Security
• Active health checks of back-end servers
• A lot of configuration options which let you deeply customize it.

It needs proper HTTP/2 support.

Primary use case of this solution is during PoC, demos, and in development environments. I have found HAProxy very helpful in replicating production environment architecture in a development and testing environment.

It has been a great help for all the use cases noted above, and economical.

Honestly, I have only evaluated the load-balancing feature because that is what I needed in my environment. As you can understand, for development and end-to-end testing, procuring a hardware load-balancer is a pretty expensive a deal.

I would like to evaluate load-balancing algorithms other than round robin and SSL offloading.

Also, it would be helpful if I could logically divide the HAProxy load-balancing into multiple entities so that I would install one HA Proxy LB application which could be used for different Web servers for different applications. I am not sure if these features are available.

It serves as a fast front-end solution to our services.

Also, it uses the mobile detection module that I developed and maintain.

It improves our scalability and responsiveness services to meet our demanding customer requirements. We now have much better metrics regarding clients types.

• The Lua module to reach an increasing user base.
• HTTP/2 support
• Multi-thread support

Maybe HAProxy could be more modular. 

The SSL termination was a nice, useful addition.

• Load Balancing. We run large scale, backend infrastructure, serving millions of queries per second with low latency requirements.

We expect to see the following improvements:

• Software LB that can run on commodity hardware, on enterprise grade Linux OS distributions.
• Simplifies our operations, improves our scalability, and lowers our costs.
• Open Source, with an established community of users that we can leverage to operate and grow our deployments.

• Availability of REST API for Configuration and Reporting
• An even bigger suite of Load Balancing algorithms
• Documentation

In the process of deployment.

We are still in the process of rolling out our deployments and migrating our traffic.

We are still in the process of rolling out our deployments and migrating our traffic.

Excellent. Both their Professional Services and Support Engineers that we have been working with are dedicated, have a high degree of expertise in the software, and with the entire stack in general.

Yes, Citrix Netscaler. We switched for the reasons above.

Complex, but their technical staff has made excellent progress on our migration to date.

Other popular Load Balancer solutions out there

Others should try it out for sure. It’s a great solution backed by a very smart set of technical folks.

HAProxy is used both as an external (customer facing) and internal (between service APIs) solution. We use it for SSL offload, domain and path based ACLs, request header manipulations, and much more.

Layer 7 health checks improved stability. Logs and metrics are very rich and easy to export which makes it easier for us to pinpoint once something is not working as we expect.

With each new release, I find very useful features and love each addition. Recently, the seamless reload feature was much needed and very helpful.

I would like to see a two (or more) native cluster support without third parties or DNS manipulations.

With an OpenShift environment, HAProxy gives us an easy way to handle a lot of containers.

The ability to handle a sequence of front- and back-ends gives the user the opportunity to send traffic through different services.

HAProxy needs to improve its ability to handle a lot of connections, to be more like NGINX.

No issues with stability.

I haven't had any issues with scalability but, as I mentioned above, some reviewers have said that NGINX is able to handle more connections than HAProxy.

It was straightforward. I created an Ansible playbook to install HAProxy. It is simple to install and the configuration files are easy to understand.

I have always used an open-source version.

Before using it, you need to understand your environment's sizing and check if HAProxy is able to handle the quantity of connections.