Item: HAProxy Community Edition
Rating: 9
Author: AMJITH LAL S

Overall Satisfaction with HAProxy

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HAProxy is used in our server environment for our academic purposes mainly for exam management servers that require high availability and security in on-premises. Also since it is open source it can easily be used for testing in demo servers irrespective of the platform it belongs. We also depend this integration to our public ip addresses.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Real-time hit logging allows us to monitor the usage efficiently
Saves the usage of individual public addresses to a large extent.
Reduces the overhead on real servers and improves overall health of servers

Cons

lacks a feature oriented graphical dashboard
Installations are linux oriented, not available in all platforms
More algorithms are required for routing in enterprises

Most Important Features

Round Robin selects servers in turns. This is the default and precise algorthm
Using layer 7 allows the load balancer to forward requests to different backend servers based on the content of the user’s request
Improved the security of all the production servers to a large extent.

Return on Investment

Improved the flexibility of server migration with this implementation
Cost effective way when compared to traditional firewall based load balancers
Could save the Server attributes like cpu cores, memory to a large extent

Key Insights

Do you think HAProxy Community Edition delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with HAProxy Community Edition's feature set?

Yes

Did HAProxy Community Edition live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of HAProxy Community Edition go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy HAProxy Community Edition again?

Yes

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.

Comments

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HA at its best, secure and reliable load balancing for production servers