HAProxy Reviews

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.

Reliability and transparency are the most valuable features.

This product is replacing another balancer which was not supported anymore. So, there is no major improvement for us.

In general, the improvement is in terms of the balancer sense which is moving from a single web server/single point of failure to using several back-end servers, that greatly improves the speed and reliable uptime.

I would improve the web-based UI, but it’s a matter of personal preference.

I have used this solution for one year.

There were no stability issues, it’s a stable product.

There were no scalability issues.

The technical support is very good , they are quick and responsive, which is essential for any product to succeed in this market.

Previously, we were using another product but it is no longer supported.

For the most part, the setup is pretty straightforward. However, as I mentioned earlier, thanks to the very good and quick technical support, all the complex requirements that we had were resolved quickly.

The pricing is good compared to the other similar products.

We evaluated at least four to five other products.

It’s a reliable product with good technical support.

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.

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.

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.

Load balancing and SSL termination.

HAProxy enabled better performance at lower costs. That enabled us to provide more stability to our clients.

Performance.

A better GUI would be nice.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Very professional, helpful.

We used F5 BIG-IP in the past and switchED due to performance issues and costs.

It is mostly straightforward and HAProxy was very helpful, guiding us during the deployment.

I think that the pricing is very fair, I would definitely recommend buying the Enterprise license.

Citrix Netscaler and Kemp LoadMaster.

HAProxy is a very powerful solution with great performance, but it needs to be evaluated carefully according to the specific environment and requirements.

• 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.