HAProxy Reviews

Our primary use case for this solution is to perform Layer 7 load balancing/reverse proxying of both our internal and external web applications.

We also use it for SSL offloading, and are beginning to utilize the basic Web Application Firewall functionality of it. 

HAProxy also performs VRRP, for redundancy, in case one of the servers were to go down.

I estimate that this product has saved our company hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in possible downtime from previous load balancers. We make a lot of our money from online sales, so it is critical to have 99.9% uptime.

The ease of use of the configuration, and great documentation, are the most valuable features for us.

The VRRP redundancy is also a mission-critical feature that works seamlessly. I can bring down a server live with minimal downtime because of this.

The only area that I can see needing improvement is the management interface, since it is pretty much all through the CLI or configuration. However, HAProxy does have another product that we evaluated called ALOHA, which has a web front-end, but we found it did not meet our needs.

No stability issues. HAProxy Enterprise Edition has been rock solid. We have essentially had no downtime caused by our load balancers in the last 10 months, because they’ve worked so well. Previously, our load balancers caused us multiple hours per year in downtime. 

I am also able to make configuration changes during the day, in production, with no worries of problems and/or downtime occurring.

No scalability issues, but only because we do not deal with a lot of scale here. We simply rely on an active/passive configuration, so if a load balancer were to fail, we would have a backup instance ready to go.

The technical support has been, in one word, perfect. Every time I call, I’m on the phone with a representative within five minutes who is highly skilled and willing to help, whether in the case of critical issues or simple advice. They always make me feel like I can pick up the phone just to have a good conversation about a new feature, a bug, a "what if" scenario, or anything else.

We previously used Coyote Point load balancers, and then switched to Fortinet’s Application Delivery Controller, due to end-of-life on the Coyote Points. After a few months of major issues involving hours of downtime and slowness, we had to make a decision to move away from Fortinet. We chose HAProxy because of the open-source community behind it, and previous experience with it. We then decided to upgrade to the Enterprise Edition for the support they offer.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. With a minimal configuration, you can get up and going quickly. However, it is very easy to modify the configuration to meet any requirements you may have, and reload in production with no downtime. The only complex part is having to maintain the base operating system, as HAProxy EE is simply a Linux package. The hardening of the operating system was done by myself since there is no appliance, like their ALOHA offering.

The price is well worth it. HAProxy Enterprise Edition paid for itself within months, simply due to the resiliency it brings. It was a bit more expensive than we were originally interested in paying, but we are thankful we chose to go with HAProxy.

We did not evaluate any other options. We considered looking at Barracuda’s offerings, but after a few days of evaluating HAProxy, we decided that it would be the best fit for us.

I would rate this product a nine out of 10. I only took off one point because of the lack of a GUI, although in this case I would say that I prefer the CLI and configuration, which is primarily how we manage it. A GUI/web interface could be helpful for users who are not as experienced in the Linux shell.

Be sure you are familiar with the Linux command line and have networking knowledge. Specifically, VRRP is helpful to understand the high-availability aspect of it. The documentation is very helpful, so be sure to follow their given best practices and configuration tips.

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.

Carers ACT operates a Skype for Business based call centre, which requires the use of a load balancer and reverse proxy for HTTP traffic for the front-end pools. HAProxy is able to fulfill both of these requirements.

In addition to these basic functions outlined above, Carers ACT also requires high availability and ease of configuration. HAProxy fulfills these additional requirements through providing high availability through VRRP and configuration synchronisation.

One of the core services that Carers ACT provides carers within the ACT region is both an advisory and respite support telephone service. Carers use this service to be connected to services, access both advice and support, as well as accessing respite services to assist them in their caring role. The Carers ACT Skype for Business implementation is being progressively re-architected to remove single points of failure, of which the load balancing role was one.

Carers ACT is also exploring innovative approaches to delivering services to carers who are unable to physically attend events, such as live streaming and providing online face to face contact. These new approaches are likely to be supported by the Carers ACT Skype for Business infrastructure. The implementation of the HAProxy load balancing solution will allow Carers ACT to begin to deliver these new services.

Under a month.

No. Carers ACT deployed a pair of clustered ALOHA Load Balancers and were able to migrate from our existing load balancing solution in under a week.

No.

No. The implementation that Carers ACT undertook is focused on reliability over scalability. The throughput required is low, but reliability requirements are high.

From initial approach to the donation of licenses to Carers ACT was a short and a pleasant experience. HAProxy appear to have a solid customer service team who are able to escalate quickly and appropriately.

Carers ACT did not require technical support during our deployment.

Yes. As a non-profit charitable organisation, Carers ACT aims to reduce costs where possible to enable finances to be redirected to services for clients as far as possible. A reduction in overhead allows for an increase in value for our clients.

Carers ACT was facing a significant renewal cost for our existing load balancer solution, and approached HAProxy who generously offered a donation of this product for our use.

HAProxy is definitely a power-user tool. It is enormously scalable and flexible, but this can come at the cost of usability. For anything other than a simple topology, editing configuration files rather than using graphical tools will be required.

This, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing, but rather for the scenarios that HAProxy excels, an administrator should have intimate knowledge of their environment and have undertaken appropriate planning. The ability to have very low-level access to configuration within each load balancer allows for configuration and deployments that could be limited by GUI configuration tools.

In-house.

Instant due to the donation of licensing from HAProxy.

Yes. HAProxy was chosen as it met our needs and because of the generous donation of an HA license pair by the HAProxy team.

I have found HAProxy's flexibility to be most valuable. HAProxy is highly customizable and will meet the business demands of most companies. It comes with plenty of load balancing algorithms and can act as a forward and reverse proxy.

HAProxy has assisted us with bringing legacy systems in compliance with third party security requirements.

The documentation is extremely detailed, but I think it could be restructured so it isn't so daunting for beginners.

We have been using HAProxy in production for four months.

None, so far.

None, so far.

None, so far.

The customer service is great. I haven't had to open many service requests, but for the few I have opened, support has always responded quickly.

Out of 1-10, a definite 10.

We currently use F5 load balancers for our environment and we hope to switch to HAProxy in the very near future.

Configuring our forward proxy was a little complex because it was my first time implementing such a solution. That being said, the people at HAProxy were more than willing to help me get the solution in place.

Not applicable.

Undetermined at this time.

Compared to solutions such as F5, Haproxy is much cheaper upfront and in yearly licensing fees.

We looked at NGINX and Squid.

The cluster feature. I use it for my second informatic room.

Four days ago, I had an inundation in my informatic room, and there was no interruption of service, because HAProxy is an excellent cluster solution.

While the product is quite perfect, it could use more supervision and be more active. Also, more simplicity, more peripherals, and more scalability.

About five years.

Yes, the first time. I have an old VMware vCenter Server 6.0 . The VMware vCenter Server 6.0 cannot go with HAProxy. HAProxy developed a special feature for me to improve the function.

No issues. I have about 500 users on HAProxy, which use a web server and mail server.

No majors issues to contact them, but did contact them regarding questions about the product.

I have used before a server from Microsoft, and a server is very slow as a solution.

The product is very simple to install and to use.

Yeah, but I don't remember it, because the other product was very bad in comparison to HAProxy.

The product is very simple and fast. It's a microchannel.

Try it and if you like it, you buy it.

The heavily tuned full stack (NIC, kernel, and user space) produces excellent performance. Their support is available for advanced troubleshooting.

We have been able to achieve extremely high performance load balancing in a short amount of time. As an example, using L4 mode, we routinely return more than 100 gigabytes per second of MySQL traffic, from a cluster of about 10 replicas.

The GUI is clunky and the on-board metric viewing solution is poor. We ship metrics off the appliance to InfluxDB (using CollectIT, which is bundled with the appliance), to view them directly with Grafana.

We have used this solution for around five years.

During our seven years with these appliances, we have found some problems, typically under very extreme conditions. In each case, the issue was quickly escalated to a team led by the CTO at Aloha.

During one of these cases, they found three separate OpenSSL bugs, and one of them was not previously reported. We also moved to using Intel NICs. Our initial batch of appliances had a different manufacturer, which struggled when pushed to the line rate.

Full layer 7 SSL termination is limited to a single core, which is a problem. We have worked around it terminating SSL on the back-ends, but this is not ideal.

Technical support is truly exceptional. The initial layer is highly technical, and can reproduce problems and provide details. Serious issues are quickly escalated to the senior R&D team.

We have moved all of our basic load balancing onto these devices. We previously used Citrix NetScalers, which were expensive, harder to configure, and more challenging to troubleshoot.

The initial setup was trivial.

Compared to the others in the market, such as Citrix and F5, the cost per performance for Aloha appliances is extremely low. In our experience, the performance and reliability is better.

We strongly prefer to go with Open Source solutions. We evaluated https://www.loadbalancer.org/ as well. We went with Aloha because of the in-house expertise that Aloha has. The primary developer of HAProxy works there.

Go for it. These systems are exceptional.

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.

• 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.