F5 BIG-IP DNS vs. HAProxy Community Edition

F5 BIG-IP DNS is well-suited for any organization looking to improve their Authoritative and Local DNS security and performance capabilities.

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

• The easy of importing DNS records into the BIG-IP
• The ease of searching and locating records
• The speed of creating multiple records when you need to duplicate effort.
• The DNS dashboards to see requests and data points.

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

• More support documentation will be a nice to have.
• I have not automated DNS deployments yet, but it would be nice to have ansible libraries for this module. (I have used ansible for many others).

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

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

F5 DNS is like DNS with out training wheels and data that can help you make real changes and improvements

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

• Protection against security threats using DNS as a vector.
• Protection against security threats targeting DNS itself.
• Provide top user experience to application clients, by directing their requests to where they will be treated with the best performance.

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