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performancereverse-proxyhaproxyf5

haproxy: What are its uses?

I got information about haproxy from Stack Exchange Gives Back 2014 page. Stackoverflow is aso using this excellent application. After visiting haproxy website, I found its uses like - load balancer. So,

  • Does it work like F5 (reverse proxy) and can it replace F5?
  • Can someone list down its all features and similar competitors application?
Solution

  • You may check this list for alternative Load Balancing tools.

    Cloud providers (Amazon, Rackspace, Google Compute Engine, Softlayer etc), but also some dedicated/VM server providers, usually offer some cheap Load-Balancing solutions as a service.

    Haproxy currently seems to be one of the most popular opensource software for Reverse-Proxy, Load-Balancing and failover. Latest versions 1.5+ support SSL-offloading but it still doesn't support content caching (F5 does).

    The usual configuration is combining it with a Content Caching system or/and CDN and using the last version you now don't even need a separate SSL-offloader. It offers a nice set of load-balancing rules (RR, leastconn, ipHash etc), apart from their website check this nicely-formatted link.