HAProxy Community Edition vs. Imperva CDN

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

I recommend it as a WAF, but not as a CDN. There are better CDNs, in my case I use transparentCDN (now www.transparentedge.eu) and Edgecast (now Verizon CDN).

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

• Reliability / Uptime
• Security

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

• CDN functionalities are secondary and cannot be compared to a top-level CDN.
• The WebGUI interface of the dashboard is very improvable. They have been changing the UX for years and it is disjointed and with services that have not yet been migrated.
• The analysis of WAF attack logs is insufficient. It is difficult to analyze attacks of past hours, event filters are missing. It is complicated to analyze the chronology of an attack.
• There are extra modules to improve the attack logs analysis but they are expensive and add little.

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

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

Also TransparentCDN (now www.transparentedge.eu ) and Level 3

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

• It's an expensive product if you have a lot of traffic volume, but I feel confident with their WAF.

Incentivized