HAProxy Technologies announced the 20th anniversary of the
HAProxy load balancer, a major milestone for one of the industry's most
successful open source products. This week, the HAProxy community will be
celebrating this milestone at the virtual HAProxyConf by presenting individual
experiences in deploying the HAProxy load balancer to power modern application
delivery with the utmost performance, observability and security.
As an early pioneer in open source, HAProxy has been
continually tested and improved for two decades by a massive and active
community that collaborated to design a trusted and reliable standard for
high-performance software load balancing.
"I'm very proud of all the people who have come
together over the years to make HAProxy the most widely used load balancer in
the world," said Willy Tarreau, CTO, product lead, HAProxy Technologies.
"I couldn't have done a tenth of what we've reached without this helpful
community, and I would never have imagined that I could have teamed up with
plenty of people I didn't know to deliver something better."
HAProxy's design provides extensive support for modern
architectures, including microservices, and for all types of deployment
environments, from bare metal servers to VMs and containers.
"At Criteo, we use HAProxy at massive scale to enable
our service mesh, proxying more than 10 million SSL/TLS requests per second
through hundreds of load balancer instances," said Damien Claisse, Site
Reliability Engineer in the Load Balancing team at Criteo. "We're fully
invested in HAProxy as an open-source project, and other projects in the
HAProxy ecosystem such as the HAProxy Data Plane API, which we utilize heavily.
Our team often contributes patches and works with Willy and the rest of the
community."
HAProxy History: From Load Balancer to Powering Modern
App Delivery
HAProxy
was originally written by Willy Tarreau, an early contributor to the Linux
kernel, who still maintains the project. Introduced in 2001 as a free, very
fast and reliable solution for offloading traffic from traditional, hardware
load balancers, HAProxy quickly grew to offer high availability, security, and
logging for TCP and HTTP-based applications, and remained modern by continually
adopting new standards as they emerged, such as HTTP/2 and QUIC. HAProxy is
particularly suited for very high traffic websites, and over the years it has
become the de-facto standard open source load balancer, now shipped with most
mainstream Linux distributions. For the full history of HAProxy, read:
- HAProxy
at Its 20-Year Anniversary -- Willy Tarreau describes his views on the success of
the project, and how it grew over the years. He also discusses how the
open-source model has evolved and other forces at play in the software
industry.
- The History of HAProxy -- HAProxy's
Origin Story, as told by Willy Tarreau in 2019, detailing the early
initial inspiration and the technical evolution of HAProxy over the years.
- HAProxy Surpasses 2 Million Requests per Second
-- In 2021, this incredible milestone was achieved on a Single Arm-based
AWS Graviton2 Instance, while maintaining sub-millisecond latency for the
99.99 percentiles! However it's also possible to run on much more modest
hardware while still achieving excellent results.
Today, HAProxy Technologies has an entire ecosystem built
around the eponymous load balancer, while at the same time balancing massive
commercial success. The company sponsors three additional open source
initiatives: the client-native library, the HAProxy Data Plane API and the HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller. Since
it was first launched two years ago, the HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller
has surpassed 10 million community downloads.