HAProxy — an introduction
In the fast-paced world of web applications and online services, ensuring high availability, optimal performance, and efficient distribution of incoming traffic is paramount. One tool that has emerged as a reliable solution for these challenges is the open-source HAProxy load balancer. HAProxy, an abbreviation for High Availability Proxy, has gained widespread popularity for its robust features, versatility, and open-source nature.
HAProxy is a high-performance, open source load balancer and reverse proxy for TCP and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) applications. Read on to find out more about how HAProxy can help you.
In the fast-paced world of web applications and online services, ensuring high availability, optimal performance, and efficient distribution of incoming traffic is paramount. One tool that has emerged as a reliable solution for these challenges is the open-source HAProxy load balancer. HAProxy, an abbreviation for High Availability Proxy, has gained widespread popularity for its robust features, versatility, and open-source nature.
HAProxy is a high-performance, open source load balancer and reverse proxy for TCP and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) applications. Read on to find out more about how HAProxy can help you.
HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is an open source, fast, reliable reverse-proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is especially well suited to high traffic applications and powers a significant portion of the world’s most visited web sites.
It is considered by many to be the de-facto open source load balancer and ships with many mainstream Linux distributions.
HAProxy.org is open source reverse proxy software and is one of the world’s most used load balancing applications. It is free to download and used by many blue-chip companies.
HAProxy.com is the home of the commercial arm of HAProxy, the company provides a fully supported version of the open source software called HAProxy Enterprise together with some additional products.
Loadbalancer.org, that’s us, we are a commercial organization that provides load balancing appliances and vendor agnostic ADC management solutions built on smart and secure open source software, including HAProxy.
We may be a little biased but our view is clear. HAProxy beats NGINX. Hands down.
Why are we biased, because HAProxy is at the core of the Loadbalancer.org ADC appliance, but being biased doesn’t mean we are wrong.
NGINX is a great open source web server and has leveraged its ‘fame’ as a web server to help support its load balancer, now additionally boosted by being part of the F5 family.
If you are already using NGINX in your environment and just need a simple load balancer, then using NGINX as a reverse proxy as well could be the right solution for you.
But if you need a real load balancer, with high availability, monitoring and full application delivery functionality then you need to use HAProxy or a commercial solution based on HAproxy like Loadbalancer.org.
HAProxy is a super fast, reliable and secure free to use load balancer used by thousands of companies globally. So why would you pay for a commercial alternative? Well for many situations HAProxy is all you need and we would highly recommend it.
However, there can be times when you need specific functionality that it doesn’t have. For example, you may require an easy to use visual interface, i.e. WebUI or perhaps you need more advanced graphing and reporting.
One of the single biggest features that drive users to commercial offerings is enterprise level support. As free software, HAProxy has no support other than its voluntary user community. For many larger organizations having no on-demand support can be a show stopper.
Loadbalancer.org is an independent commercial business that provides ADC appliances and load balancing management systems. We are big fans of HAProxy, so much so that we use the open source software within our own load balancing products.
We are different to HAProxy in that we have built additional layers of functionality into our products based on 20 years of customer feedback. We also provide full enterprise-grade 24/7 support and we have created a niche in providing unique solutions to organizations who love HAProxy but need something more tailored to their specific needs.
