HAProxy and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing compete in the load balancing and traffic management category. HAProxy holds the upper hand in terms of flexibility and customization, while Amazon ELB excels in seamless AWS integration and automatic scaling.
Features: HAProxy offers flexibility and customization, with various load balancing algorithms and high availability features such as VRRP. It provides advanced traffic rules and reliability. Amazon Elastic Load Balancing seamlessly integrates with AWS, supports automatic scaling, and offers efficient traffic management with sticky sessions and routing policies.
Room for Improvement: HAProxy needs improved documentation, better logging, and a more user-friendly GUI. Without a web interface, configuration can be challenging. Amazon ELB could enhance third-party integrations, strengthen security, and offer better stability and issue resolution under high traffic.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HAProxy is typically deployed on-premises and relies on self-handled support, given its open-source nature. Its extensive documentation is helpful, though direct support is limited. Amazon Elastic Load Balancing is designed for the public cloud, featuring an easy deployment process and benefiting from dedicated AWS support teams.
Pricing and ROI: HAProxy is cost-effective, particularly for open-source users, with its Enterprise edition offering additional features at a higher cost. Amazon ELB's pay-as-you-go model makes it affordable within cloud environments, linking costs to data processed. Both solutions provide strong ROI, with HAProxy being more economical for minimal expenditure scenarios.
Elastic Load Balancing is a part of a total solution package.
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing requires minimal personnel for handling, which contributes to organizational value either in terms of cost savings or efficiency.
Operational efficiency has improved; we no longer have staff consistently monitoring backend servers during deployment or scaling events, as HAProxy's health checks and hitless reloads allow us to push changes with minimal manual intervention.
This resulted in a drastic decrease in costs and, at the same time, the accuracy of the hits coming on HAProxy was almost around 100% or 99.99%.
I estimate seeing a return on investment with HAProxy, as it significantly reduced staff requirements and enhanced scaling capabilities, particularly when transitioning from NGINX, which faced issues.
The support team has architects available.
The technical support is very responsive due to the prime-level support package.
I would rate Amazon's technical support a nine out of ten.
Since we are utilizing the open-source edition, community forums, mailing lists, and GitHub have been invaluable, with typically someone having encountered the same problems we faced.
My interactions with HAProxy's customer support were limited, but the feedback from my team indicated satisfactory service.
It automatically scales up or down based on the quantity of requests, optimizing cost while efficiently managing varying workloads.
Managing traffic load is efficient as Auto Scaling Group can easily be connected with ALB based on the number of requests.
We manage an automatic load balancing feature where we add HAProxy servers dynamically behind the application load balancer to handle more traffic.
HAProxy's scalability is excellent; as our traffic expands, it handles load increases effortlessly.
For scalability, HAProxy meets my needs, supporting our initial horizontal scaling and then adapting to vertical scaling in a VMware environment.
It is a stable and reliable service of AWS.
This reliability serves as a key reason for our choice, providing us with confidence even when faced with heavy traffic.
The hot reload feature of HAProxy also really helped us so that we never had to shut it down to reload it.
We have reduced a lot of servers, replacing them with one or two HAProxy servers which deliver better performance, accuracy, and an almost 100% success rate with requests.
The ability to directly block specific IP addresses without additional service integration would be beneficial.
Improvements could involve making Amazon Elastic Load Balancing a global service, as currently, it is region-specific.
For example, in India, we have just two regions at the moment, which impacts latency.
The configuration syntax is powerful yet can become overwhelming for newcomers; a more beginner-friendly interface or a native GUI without relying on third-party tools would ease the onboarding process.
An easier desktop interface to connect to a remote server and make changes on my PC would be beneficial.
The reloading functionality is effective as it allows soft reloads without interrupting traffic patterns.
Pricing is okay, and Amazon has plans to reduce prices further.
Using ALB incurs a cost as opposed to the free open-source solutions like NGINX or HAProxy.
Since we use the open-source edition, there are no licensing fees, with the main cost being the infrastructure running on EC2 instances in AWS, which helps maintain low expenses.
Setting up HAProxy didn't cost anything for me.
The pricing remains competitive compared to other vendors.
It is the de facto standard for AWS workloads and supports the AWS ecosystem seamlessly.
Deploy our solution in multiple availability zones, it ensures that the system is always available and does not go down.
The Application Load Balancer is noteworthy due to session persistence, traffic distribution, and integration with auto-scaling, which helps manage server scaling automatically based on demand.
By moving all SSL termination to the load balancer, I now manage certificates in a single place, and I can also utilize Let's Encrypt with HAProxy's built-in ACME support, making renewal automatic.
HAProxy positively impacted our organization by exceeding scalability expectations, initially projected at 200k requests but ultimately handling over 15 million transactions per second without any issues.
As a production engineer at that time, I definitely wanted to ensure that the system could handle massive connections, especially since we operated an e-commerce platform where we could not lose any customer calls.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| HAProxy | 9.9% |
| Amazon Elastic Load Balancing | 1.9% |
| Other | 88.2% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 14 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 5 |
| Large Enterprise | 5 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 17 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 15 |
| Large Enterprise | 16 |
Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It can handle the varying load of your application traffic in a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability Zones. Elastic Load Balancing offers three types of load balancers that all feature the high availability, automatic scaling, and robust security necessary to make your applications fault tolerant.
HAProxy is considered by many in the industry to be one of the fastest and most popular and trusted software load balancer products in the marketplace today. Organizations are able to immediately deploy HAProxy solutions to enable websites and applications to optimize performance, security, and observability. HAProxy solutions are available to scale to any environment.
HAProxy is an open-source product and has a robust, active, reliable community. The solutions are continually tested and improved on by the community. HAProxy offers a dynamic design to support the most modern architectures, microservices, and deployment environments (appliances, containers, virtual, and cloud).
HAProxy utilizes a cloud-native protocol, which makes it a complete solution for cloud services such as Red Hat OpenShift, OVH, Rackspace, Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and more. It also can be used as the reference load balancer in OpenStack.
HAProxy Products
Reviews from Real Users
“Having the right load balancing solution – which is what HAProxy is – and protection in place gives organizations peace of mind.” - Nathanel S., Platform Architect at SES
“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. The setup was not difficult; it usually takes a day to complete for a VPC. When it comes to pricing, HAProxy is free.” - Nasir O., Network & Cloud Architect at Koala Compute Inc.
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