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.

The product is an open-source load balancer. We deploy it for our application as a front-end server where all the users come on that particular HAProxy server, and it is redirected to our back-end servers.

It helps include the reverse proxy or more security modules for enhancing security. It helps with enhancing web application security.

The solution is open-source. 

HAProxy can provide protocol-level load balancing. We can use the HTTP or HTTPS load balancing, including the PCP and UDP protocol level load balancing.

The setup is straightforward.

It is scalable.

The solution is stable. 

It's saved project costs and time. Since the deployment is very easy and the open-source functionality saves a huge amount of cost in terms of project deployment.

The product should have more security and dashboard functionality for monitoring so that any administrator can see the usability and track all the incoming and outgoing requests. It should have a better dashboard GUI, and more security models should be there. The GUI should be more responsive and show the detailed output of logs. We need it to be more visible.

Documentation could be better.

I've used the solution for around four years. We started using it in 2018.

It's reliable and very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

It's a scalable product.

There are more than 2,000 users on the product right now. 

We already scaled up with the different sets, so we previously scaled this solution.

I did not solicit the help of any technical support. 

The documentation that's available on the HAProxy is okay. There is some room for improvement in that regard. 

Neutral

We previously used a traditional load balancer.

We used a TCP load balancer. The NGNIX, we use for the reverse proxy for HTTP and HTTPS protocol. However, for particular applications, we required TCP load balancer, so we used HAProxy there.

HAProxy provides the TCP and UDP port protocol-based load balancing, and NGINX is the reverse proxy, providing a great solution for web traffic, HTTP, and HTTPS.

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It's not too complex. 

One single administrator can manage and deploy this product.

I handled the deployment of the product myself. 

We just replaced some of our OEM solutions with an open-source solution. We did not invest anything in that, we just save the money on some OEM products. We have to purchase some load balancers, however, we replaced this with the open-source option and they are performing well. Therefore, there is a return on investment in the sense that we replaced that traditional load balancer that we paid for.

We do not need to pay for the product as it is open-source. 

There's no additional cost. We can deploy and manage on our own, and community support is available in HAProxy.

We evaluated NGINX prior to using this product.

If you require a TCP and UDP protocol for load balancing, this is a very great solution.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

The main use cases are for load balancing and limiting traffic. It is utilized as a front-end server for balancing HTTP traffic, as well as for balancing traffic between application servers and database servers like Redis and Elasticsearch. HAProxy is employed for both HTTP and TCP load balancing purposes, ensuring optimal resource utilization and preventing overloading of any single server. 

When dealing with scenarios that require splitting or monitoring Redis clusters with external masters and two slaves, HAProxy becomes essential. This is because HAProxy can significantly reduce delays in Redis communication when switching roles between servers. This reduction in delay improves application load time and prevents unnecessary downtime during server switchovers. It is a crucial tool in ensuring smooth service provision without any interruptions.

There is room for improvement in HAProxy's dynamic configuration. Currently, dynamic changes are lost when reloading the service, and it would be beneficial if dynamic configuration changes could be applied without losing the configuration or reloading the service, ensuring backups and preserving the static configuration.

I have been using it for six years.

I would rate its stability capabilities nine out of ten.

It provides impressive scalability. I would rate it ten out of ten.

In a specific situation where a question was posted on a forum, the issue was successfully resolved within a day or the following day. I would rate their customer support services nine out of ten.

Positive

We worked with NGINX, but these two solutions are not entirely comparable as they serve different primary purposes. NGINX functions both as a web server and a reverse proxy server, while HAProxy is primarily a load-balancing proxy. They both have load-balancing capabilities, but their main focus and functionalities are distinct.

The initial setup can be challenging. I would rate it six out of ten.

For simpler cases, the deployment process can take around one hour. For more complex scenarios, it can extend up to one week. 

We are using HAProxy as an open-source.

NGINX is easier to configure and is well-suited for load balancing against an application server. However, HAProxy is more versatile and can be fine-tuned for various scenarios, particularly in load-balancing multiple application servers. In terms of deployment, HAProxy is easy to integrate into a green-blue deployment approach. It allows for simpler configuration and sending commands to its sockets.

Based on customer stability and varying use cases, I recommend choosing this solution. I would rate it nine 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 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.

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.