What is the difference between HAProxy and load balancer?

What is HAProxy and how does it work?

When it comes to load balancing connections and traffic, most organizations have the option of using a hardware appliance, which provides for a centralized, managed solution.

While this offers some advantages, in some instances a standalone, software load balancer is required. When one is needed, there are other options that are available. HAProxy is one of those options, providing multiple uses, including load balancing, SSL termination and proxying and providing multiple options for performance improvements. This article will review HAProxy features, its role and options for how to use HAProxy.

HAProxy Features. In many ways, HAProxy can be a feature set loaded with options, but it is worth noting some basic features are available with every configuration, even if they are disabled by default. These include: Simple, multi-threaded TCP/UDP/TCP handling. Round-robin. Reverse proxying. Support for multiple IP addresses and ports with a single instance. HAProxy Role. HAProxy is a load balancer that provides multiple functions to meet the needs of organizations and networks. Most simply, a load balancer can make HTTP and HTTPS requests from multiple servers or IP addresses, balance load based on a metric such as how busy the network is or how much a particular request costs to handle.

However, it can also be used to: Terminate all of a network's SSL traffic to and from servers. Do transparent proxying. Provide SSL. HAProxy Benefits. HAProxy offers multiple benefits, depending on the organization, its needs and its environment. For example, in a company with multiple locations across the country, but limited bandwidth between them, HAProxy can be configured to provide more bandwidth than any hardware load balancer. That configuration would also make it a candidate for use as a single-server replacement for a location, in cases where an appliance doesn't work or isn't practical. In situations where bandwidth can be a challenge, HAProxy is also an ideal option to provide additional bandwidth and reduce latency with the use of large buffers.

HAProxy can also be used to terminate all of the SSL traffic on a network and use the capacity as cache.

Why is HAProxy better than NGINX?

I always found NGINX a bit scary in terms of performance.

It makes a big service like Instagram run smoothly without any problems, but when you add more load it's still not that fast.

The good news is that HAProxy is actually really fast in the first place. With a little effort you can make it as fast as NGINX or even better. So why should you use HAProxy instead of NGINX?

In this article I will explain how to make HAProxy better by writing your own version of NGINX in order to answer this question. As a side effect, I hope to give you a few hints on how to improve your applications with HAProxy in the future.

In particular I will show you how to implement a new caching layer that can greatly improve your requests while adding a small overhead. You may find these topics interesting: How to measure HAProxy performance. In order to measure the performance of HAProxy, you need to know a few things. In particular you need to know what is your memory limit, because HAProxy makes a big cache and uses a lot of RAM.

The second point is to know the amount of clients that use HAProxy. For example, I have a HAProxy instance on my laptop which I use only for testing, but it serves almost 1,000 clients at the same time.

The last point is a trick called HAProxy Performance Test and that allows you to see the memory consumption of HAProxy. You can download the binary here.2.6, 2015-10-14 Copyright (C) 2013-2015 - HaProxy Technologies - All rights reserved. Available under the BSD 3-clause license < This script tests HAProxy (or any other proxy) using a list of users. A user is a set of http(s) request that can be either a single web page or a series of pages. HAProxy is tested against a very large number of http(s) request.

What is the difference between HAProxy and load balancer?

When I'm going to configure HAProxy for my load balancer, then which part of it should I put at host and which should I put at server?

I was not able to explain this scenario very well in wikipedia. In your question you state that. Load balancer for web server(not my case). I have used HAProxy already. Then I configured for my case only.

This shows that you haven't really made any effort to understand what a web server is and how load balancers work. You probably don't want to use an LB (a load balancer) for web servers anyway since you wouldn't be able to do SSL termination. Instead you probably want a reverse proxy, not an ACL based one like HAProxy. Some possibilities are nginx (nginx ingress controller) or haproxy, both can run inside kubernetes. And both can scale too.

If you are looking at load balancing with a load balancer for a web server then you want to look at a HTTP load balancer, rather than a TCP based one. A HTTP proxy will do everything for you including SSL terminaton if required.