HAProxy and Istio compete in the load balancing and service mesh category. HAProxy stands out for simplicity and cost-effectiveness, while Istio leads in advanced features and flexibility.
Features: HAProxy offers simplicity, high performance, and reliability. Istio provides a robust microservices architecture, advanced traffic management, and comprehensive observability.
Room for Improvement: HAProxy could improve its documentation and add advanced traffic-shaping features. Istio needs a simplified setup process and enhanced stability.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HAProxy is known for straightforward deployment and reliable customer support. Istio, despite more complex deployment, benefits from a responsive community and support teams.
Pricing and ROI: HAProxy is favored for cost-effectiveness and quick ROI. Istio, despite higher upfront costs, is valued for its extensive feature set and long-term benefits.
At first, I didn't see significant savings, but in the end, I realized that I didn't need as many tools since Istio already contains many aspects and features, which saved me a lot of time and probably money.
Using Istio in a banking environment provides excellent value by ensuring secure microservice communication and minimizing performance issues through traceability and other observability features.
Responses are often received within 24 hours, which is fair given the free nature of the service.
Handling large-scale environments with proxies can strain resources, but horizontal scaling can improve fault tolerance.
I use AWS EKS with a cluster autoscaler, enabling automatic scaling based on load.
The architecture, configuration, and resource management can impact stability.
I rate the stability of Istio as an eight or nine out of ten.
Istio has been stable in my experience.
It would be beneficial if Istio offered paid support options, similar to AWS's enterprise support, to quickly resolve issues that might affect production.
Reducing the latency between the control plane and the data plane would be beneficial.
Integration with observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Elasticsearch incurs additional costs.
Istio provides excellent documentation and support, allowing for easy troubleshooting.
The security feature with mutual TLS authentication, which is identity-based, and the traffic management using cloud load balancers are very valuable.
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.
Connect
Intelligently control the flow of traffic and API calls between services, conduct a range of tests, and upgrade gradually with red/black deployments.
Secure
Automatically secure your services through managed authentication, authorization, and encryption of communication between services.
Control
Apply policies and ensure that they’re enforced, and that resources are fairly distributed among consumers.
Observe
See what's happening with rich automatic tracing, monitoring, and logging of all your services.
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