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.