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HAProxy 2.0

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Re: HAProxy 2.0

#11

Post by smueller1234 »

johnramsden wrote: post #2

I've always used Nginx as a proxy, but I've seen HAProxy mentioned, what are some of the benefits of using HAProxy over nginx as a proxy or load balancer?

I'll let others comment on the technical differences.

Have you read The Maglev paper out of Google? At the time right before that was published, one of my engineers was implementing much the same thing. They considered both HAProxy and nginx for the second layer of load balancing. The were technical reasons in either direction. There was some pressure (from me) to go with nginx because we were already using it as our primary webserver, so we could avoid introducing another new technology for people to master.

We went with HAProxy. Why? Because when said engineer contacted them, describing what he was doing, they (here: the main HAProxy dev) engaged in discussion, helped, even included his needs in their planning. At least at the time, nginx folks just responded with that they'd talk to him after he had secured a licensing deal. The uphill battle this engineer would've had to fight in corporate politics to get licensing sorted out that early in the prototyping phase would have been rough. Last I heard, the company still had a licensing/support deal with HAProxy.

Good presales matter!

(Edit: can't spell.)

Re: HAProxy 2.0

#12

Post by yskchu »

mattbillenstein wrote: post #5
johnramsden wrote: post #2

I've always used Nginx as a proxy, but I've seen HAProxy mentioned, what are some of the benefits of using HAProxy over nginx as a proxy or load balancer?

Big difference is that haproxy did not used to support ssl without using something external like stunnel -- nginx basically did it all out of the box and I haven't had a need for haproxy in quite some time now.

haproxy has supported SSL since version 1.5, released 2014, so it's been available for some time now

Re: HAProxy 2.0

#13

Post by fizx »

johnramsden wrote: post #2

I've always used Nginx as a proxy, but I've seen HAProxy mentioned, what are some of the benefits of using HAProxy over nginx as a proxy or load balancer?

I've found it easer to do some traffic-shaping with (i.e. queue up more than N connections per ip). The status page/dashboard is really nice. The English docs are better. This might have changed in the last three years

Re: HAProxy 2.0

#14

Post by aidanlister »

smueller1234 wrote: post #11
johnramsden wrote: post #2

I've always used Nginx as a proxy, but I've seen HAProxy mentioned, what are some of the benefits of using HAProxy over nginx as a proxy or load balancer?

I'll let others comment on the technical differences. Have you read The Maglev paper out of Google? At the time right before that was published, one of my engineers was implementing much the same thing. They considered both HAProxy and nginx for the second layer of load balancing. The were technical reasons in either direction. There was some pressure (from me) to go with nginx because we were already using it as our…

What are you spending with HAProxy a year now?

Re: HAProxy 2.0

#15

Post by wtarreau »

leetrout wrote: post #4
johnramsden wrote: post #2

I've always used Nginx as a proxy, but I've seen HAProxy mentioned, what are some of the benefits of using HAProxy over nginx as a proxy or load balancer?

The biggest difference a few years ago was HA Proxy could do layer 4 load balancing where nginx was layer 7. These days I think they’ve grown a lot closer together on capabilities. nginx remains a true web server where HA Proxy is not.

I'm not sure what you mean. HAProxy has always been a layer 4/7 load balancer and has indeed never been a web server.

NGINX historically was a web server (an excellent one) which has evolved towards proxying and a bit of load balancing. But in terms of LB features it lacks a lot, just like you wouldn't try to cross-dress haproxy into a web server in any way. It's true that for many quite simple setups nginx is often enough and saves the admin from having to learn another tool. But when you start to handle tens of thousands of domains, need to perform DDoS protection, handle thousands of servers, perform inter-DC state synchronization , stream tens of Gbps of traffic, or perform advanced actions on health check status change, it's not well suited aanymore. It's still the best web server I know, and many hosting infrastructures combine haproxy+varnish+nginx together, taking the best of each and deliver unrivaled quality of service. The beauty here is that these 3 best components in their respective categories are all free to use so there's no reason to have to choose between one or the other, just use all 3 and be happy!

Re: HAProxy 2.0

#16

Post by lukax »

johnramsden wrote: post #2

I've always used Nginx as a proxy, but I've seen HAProxy mentioned, what are some of the benefits of using HAProxy over nginx as a proxy or load balancer?

HAProxy allows easier proxying of WebSockets (without having to know all the WebSocket URLs). It also allows proxying TCP traffic without much hassle (in nginx you have to compile/enable stream module - at least in default Ubuntu package). Until long nginx did not allow proxying HTTP requests without caching request body which may be undesired behaviour if you are uploading big files and want the backend to start processing the body as soon as possible.

Re: HAProxy 2.0

#17

Post by smueller1234 »

aidanlister wrote: post #14
smueller1234 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll let others comment on the technical differences. Have you read The Maglev paper out of Google? At the time right before that was published, one of my engineers was implementing much the same thing. They considered both HAProxy and nginx for the second layer of load balancing. The were technical reasons in either direction. There was some pressure (from me) to go with nginx because we were already using it as our…

What are you spending with HAProxy a year now?

Can't tell you. Don't work there any more and don't remember in detail, but wouldn't disclose that if I was still there. Let's say: a significant fraction of an engineer per year. (But note that this was a very large internet company, worth tens of billions, to have had to build it's own multi level load balancer, not a startup.)

Re: HAProxy 2.0

#18

Post by TimTheTinker »

johnramsden wrote: post #2

I've always used Nginx as a proxy, but I've seen HAProxy mentioned, what are some of the benefits of using HAProxy over nginx as a proxy or load balancer?

I’ve never used either (just an F5 appliance), but I know HAProxy is built by a core Linux kernel contributor and has a reputation as the foremost infrastructure-grade software load balancer. In fact, a lot of hardware load balancer appliances run HAProxy under the hood.

From all accounts, if you really need a load balancer, or even if you just need failover, HAProxy should be your default choice. It has high-availability features, monitoring, supports TLS & SNI, HTTP2, session replication, Lua scripting, and almost any other feature you might need. It was also designed from the ground up to be a high-performance, high-availability load balancer. (NGinx does several other things.)

Stack Exchange (the company behind Stack Overflow) uses it in front of their IIS application servers, and so do a lot of other smart people.

Also, it appears NGinx has commercial/OSS conflict of interest issues — like in recent versions all monitoring functionality was removed from the OSS distribution.

Re: HAProxy 2.0

#20

Post by nickramirez »

johnramsden wrote: post #2

I've always used Nginx as a proxy, but I've seen HAProxy mentioned, what are some of the benefits of using HAProxy over nginx as a proxy or load balancer?

What open-source NGINX lacks that open-source HAProxy has:

* ACL rules with full support for logical if statements [1]

* active health checks

* end-to-end HTTP/2 [2]

* Robust logging or a dashboard with metrics

* The ability to read env variables

* session stickiness

* DNS service discovery [3]

These are just things I'm aware of, there could be a lot more.

HAProxy has shown itself to perform better for certain users such as Booking.com [4]

[1] https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/depth/ifis... [2] https://trac.nginx.org/nginx/ticket/923 [3] https://danielparker.me/haproxy/nginx/comparison/nginx-vs-ha... [4] https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slid...

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