Akamai Bot Manager vs. HAProxy Community Edition

Akamai Bot Manager is perfect if you want a clear idea of how much real human traffic is on your website. Bots are rarely harmful but can overload your underlying hardware/cloud architecture, increasing maintenance costs. This is especially true if you are handling an eCommerce website since traffic spikes - due to marketing initiatives or promos - can kill your website when you need it most.

Incentivized

It prevents a single server failure from being a downtime event by adding redundancy to every layer of your architecture. A load balancer facilitates redundancy for the backend layer (web/app servers), but for a true high availability setup, you need to have redundant load balancers as well. So it is well suited for all production related servers and less suited for individual servers that do not require redundancy.

Incentivized

• To identify the bots, Akamai Bot Manager has already classified over 3000 bot signatures.
• The bot console is simple to use and versatile.
• The custom bot can be constructed based on your specifications and added to the existing bot database.

Incentivized

• Allow traffic to systems to be distributed evenly, providing high availability
• Allow restrictions to resources using OAuth tokens
• Allow load balancing of databases

Incentivized

• Bots are created all the time, so sometimes the heuristics used by the solution can detect false positives
• For Mobile Apps, you need and external SDK (Akamai BMP)

Incentivized

• My understanding is a lack of support for UDP traffic
• One mistake in the haproxy.cfg prevents the entire thing from starting rather than only affecting the part of the config file that may have a typo of some other syntax problem.

Incentivized

It is very easy to use. I was able to find a lot of documents for it on the internet. Very good community support. There are lots of examples available to try. We mostly use a command-line user interface to interact with it. The CLI is also super easy to use and very easy to interact with

Incentivized

We haven't used customer support. We mostly used the community version. We build a multi-node HAProxy cluster with HA to the proxy itself using opensource plugins available. With the support available on the internet and the documents available we don't need to use much customer support.

Incentivized

Security concerns call for the deployment of Akamai Bot Manager. It assists in preventing bots from being unable to target our website and applications. The Akamai lab rejects the request or attack before it reaches my cloud infrastructure or my applications. My application is more secure as a result.

Incentivized

We chose HA Proxy because it is cheaper than a hardware balancer, it is an open-source solution with a large community behind it and with constant updates. It also allows custom scripts according to needs.HA Proxy is a solution used in many internet sites like GitHub, Reddit, Twitter, and Tuenti.

Incentivized

• Good ROI over the first month.
• Gain visibility over bot traffic.
• Protect websites and mobile applications.

Incentivized

• Significantly lower investment vs competitors. In the case of F5s we have Virtual Editions so we're paying for the hardware to run it on top of the several thousand dollar licenses that are required for each pair and we currently have a pair of F5s per client so there's a huge potential for cost savings there.
• Requires our network engineers to learn a new skill or our Systems engineers to take on the responsibility of managing the load balancers. It's not a huge difference either way, but it does impact the way we have done business in the past.

Incentivized