AWS CloudTrail vs. HAProxy Community Edition vs. Kemp LoadMaster

It is necessary to enable [AWS] Cloudtrail when using AWS in a production environment, otherwise you will not have any idea what is happening within your accounts. Third party monitoring applications will all require [AWS] CloudTrail to be enabled as well. I would not recommend it solely as a monitoring tool, to get the most out of it you must send the logs elsewhere. Either to Cloudwatch logs or a third party product.

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

Loadmaster is very powerful and flexible load balancer. Variety of options allows to create a complex network of rules and routes. During our website rollout Loadmaster allowed us to run multiple generations of the website simultaneously and seamlessly by doing the content switching on the fly. Powerful API allows easy integration into any development lifecycle.

Incentivized

• API Log
• User activity tracking
• Real-time alerts

Incentivized

• Low-Cost Load Balancer
• Intelligent Request Routing based on URL and/or URI
• Extremely flexible load balancing and healthchecks, can do almost anything including HTTP, HTTPS, PostgreSQL, etc.
• SSL Termination

Incentivized

• Where the LoadBalancer excels is the multiple levels at which you can load balance servers. We currently use layer 7 LB, but others are available as well.
• I particularly like the ability for the LB to know when servers are down, and if all are offline then you can create a redirect to a static HTML page or some other destination that is more informative.
• The ease in which a service can be created and deployed using already pre-canned templates makes it a very convenient setup process.

Incentivized

• [In my experience] Cost can easily get out of control with multiple trails on full logging
• Logs can be difficult to decipher

Incentivized

• A few, rare times each year, HAProxy CPU utilization spikes to 100% and server has to be rebooted - this may be related to HAProxy OR it could be an external factor causing this.

Incentivized

• Ability to 'clone' existing Virtual Services for rapid deployment of similar ones.
• A better API for ease of automation.
• Simplification of Certificate management.
• Better explanations of Kemp implementations of industry standard protocols like VRRP (or CARP)
• More control over device factory reset configuration and forcibly breaking HA pairs at boot time

Incentivized

I'm very pleased with the support I've received as well as the quality of the product.

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

Kemp makes it very easy to setup, configure and manage the LoadMaster without needing a lot of help from their engineers. The interface is very easy to understand and intuitive to use. We like how it is not complicated - I can easily have one of my techs login and they can figure out how to setup/configure virtual services for load balancing without needing a manual or tech support.

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

Support has been easy to deal with; I have only need[ed] to contact them a few times during setup. Once its been in place and operational, we have not need[ed] to mess with the system [which] is a huge advantage. I like system[s] that do not break and require constant attention in a production environment.

The installation was straight forward. Once i installed it, their technical support team helped me with configuration

Incentivized

I think in the end, CloudTrail has more features and you can dive deeper inside the logs so it depends on your usage and what you expect in the end to make the right choice, I would say that both tools are really useful and bring a lot of benefits to I.T. companies.

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

We chose Kemp LoadMaster because it is 1/10 the price of the competition and MUCH easier to deploy and configure and WORKS. We have had ZERO issues with the product since installation. Their engineers and their sales team have both reached out post-install to check in and see if everything is working as expected.

• Allows us to investigate any strange api actions
• Increases security
• Audit trail of changes made in AWS

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

• We used Kemp LoadMaster for many projects. For a lot of customers, load balancers were too expensive or too complicated before we introduced Kemp products.
• It's not a overly complicated product, so we were able to train many engineers on it and have them get a certification.

Incentivized