F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs. HAProxy Community Edition

There was a need to have the DR environment to be available actively but not to send the traffic unless the production is down The F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) priority feature helped achieving it. It was well suited in handling the HTTP headers using polices and iRules. It was less appropriate from the application security perspective in the current version. But after attending the AppWorld 2024, I see a lot of ways to protect the network and the application with several features.

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

• Does web traffic management very well.
• To allow API's to work with our in house services
• To make intelligent load balancing decisions.

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

• Time investment in creating Virtual Servers across many LTMs
• Ability to change object names after creation
• Support ability to troublshoot iRUles

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

As far as I know, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) from F5 is the best and the number of features is unmatched compared to its competitors. The first-time setup is also quick and easy and the product behaves as a full proxy which is rarely seen. The support is good and also the help articles are numerous.

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

• Negative impact in that it makes it very easy for applications to be spun up but cleanup of old/ unused deployments do not happen causing resources to be consumed unnecessarily
• When used in a multiblade viprion guest, issues with backplane and blade replication causing impact
• Ability to deploy multiple instances helped with network segmentation

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