Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review If you have a cluster of nodes with MariaDB MaxScale and you want all the nodes of the cluster to have a similar load and not to be be penalized for queries or writes to the database, you can mount the MaxScale product in front of the MariaDB cluster. MaxScale will balance the requests based on what is being sent to each node to have an equitable load and will cache the queries that it sends to each one. This optimizes the response time to database queries and spreads the load out among all nodes in a similar way.
Read full review Pros 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 Read full review Open source proxy server Great performance Offers load balancing Modular architecture Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Improve balancing based on SQL queries Improve swap memory consumption It has a slight delay Read full review Usability 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
Read full review MariaDB MaxScale is a powerful tool and easy to use. It has helped us a lot to improve the performance of our database queries. It implements a security layer that acts as a firewall for the databases, masks the data, or limits the results of the queries. It also integrates easily with Kafka.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review We have launched several inquiries to MariaDB MaxScale support, and they have always responded very quickly. They also want to hold frequent meetings with the client to get their opinion understand how they can help. I see a very human support that is concerned about the customer.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review ProxySLQ allows many simultaneous connections and allows the cache of queries in memory but it does not have high availability or scalability natively, only through external tools.
HAProxy is not able to perform load balancing in an optimal way.
Instead, MariaDB MaxScale allows high availability, scalability, and data replication to external systems such as Kafka. In addition, MaxScale has a monitor that allows you to see the status of the set of databases.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Reduce the number of database nodes Improve the performance of the applications that use the databases A new layer is added in the service architecture Read full review ScreenShots