Item: HAProxy Community Edition
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HAProxy works extremely well as a low-cost alternative to more expensive load balancers such as our F5s and Netscalers that we're using in some areas of our network. The cost of free is also pretty hard to argue with especially when compared to the prices of those F5s and Netscalers.

Pros and Cons

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

My understanding is a lack of support for UDP traffic
One mistake in the haproxy.cfg prevents the entire thing from starting rather than only affecting the part of the config file that may have a typo of some other syntax problem.

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.

Alternatives Considered

F5 BIG-IP and Citrix NetScaler

The cost is significantly lower and personally I don't find one to be harder to learn than the other. Overall they features stack up pretty closely and I'd pick HAProxy wherever it was feasible and we can save a tremendous amount of money for the business. The NetScalers & F5s do have their place though as they support 2 factor authentication from my understanding which I haven't figured out how to do with HAProxy.

Other Software Used

F5 BIG-IP, Citrix NetScaler, Atom, Cisco ASA, Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure, Cisco Nexus, Cisco Catalyst Switches, Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series, Palo Alto Panorama, Ansible, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, Sublime Text, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Windows Server, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, NetScout nGeniusONE, NetBrain

Likelihood to Recommend

I've had good experiences with most things that I've attempted using HAProxy. About the only thing I haven't tried yet is setting up an HA Pair using VRRP which I just found out is even a possibility. But it does great at terminating SSL on HTTPS VIPs which is most of what I've used it for, About the only thing I haven't figured out yet is one specific use case I have setup on a pair of F5s for syslog forwarding to multiple destinations, but I also haven't spent a ton of time looking into it since I think there's a limitation with UDP traffic and HAProxy.

Usability

It's an amazingly simple and easy to use product with a huge community and tons of write-ups online. If you need to do something usually the answer is only a few quick searches away. On top of that the cost of free unless you want/need to pay for commercial support is incredibly hard to argue with too.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar	None

Easy Tasks

Configuration is as simple as a modifying a text file.
Terminating SSL is very simple.
Controlling traffic based on source IP or destination URL/URI is incredibly easy.
Installation was incredibly easy as well.

Difficult Tasks

I haven't found a good way to validate config changes prior to actually applying them to ensure the least amount of downtime.

An excellent low cost load balancer

Overall Satisfaction with HAProxy