Major HAProxy Releases Increase Support for Cloud-Native and Containerized Application Architectures


Key Community Releases Include HAProxy 2.0, HAProxy Data Plane API and HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller

WALTHAM, Mass., June 17, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- HAProxy Technologies, provider of the world’s fastest and most widely-used software load balancer, today announced that the HAProxy community has released HAProxy 2.0 and several other key products that make it easier to extend, configure and manage HAProxy in cloud-native and containerized environments. The company also announced its inaugural community user conference, HAProxyConf 2019, which will take place in Amsterdam, Netherlands on November 12th and 13th, 2019.

“The release of HAProxy 2.0 along with the new HAProxy Data Plane API and HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller mark the culmination of a significant re-architecture of HAProxy to add the flexibility and features needed to optimize support for modern application architectures,” said Willy Tarreau, HAProxy community lead and HAProxy Technologies CTO. “I am extremely proud of the amazing community, who have all played a significant part in making HAProxy one of the most successful open source projects ever by providing code submissions that span new functionality and bug fixes, quality assurance testing, CI build environments, bug reports and much more.”

HAProxy 2.0 is a major milestone release for the extremely popular software load balancer. Among the most important advancements since the last stable release (HAProxy 1.8) are:

  • Cloud-Native Threading and Logging, which greatly simplifies performance tuning and logging in cloud and other environments by automatically setting the number of worker threads to match the number of available CPU cores.
  • HTTP Representation (HTX), which now serves as the foundation that allows HAProxy to provide the best-in-class performance while accelerating the delivery of new features for modern application architectures, including support for new HTTP protocols.
  • End-to-End HTTP/2 Support, a key requirement for modern architectures made possible via the default HTTP Representation.
  • Full gRPC Support, including bidirectional streaming of data, detection of gRPC messages and logging of gRPC traffic.
  • Layer 7 Retries, which reduces downtime by allowing retries at Layer 7 for failed HTTP requests.
  • Process Manager, which provides central orchestration to control the lifecycle of new sidecar processes such as Data Plane API, and Stream Processing Offload Agents (SPOAs), as well as older workers.
  • Polyglot Extensibility, including new Stream Processing Offload Engine (SPOE) libraries and examples that make it easier to create extension points to build upon HAProxy using programming languages such as C, Golang, Python, Lua and .NET Core.
  • Traffic Shadowing, which allows requests to be mirrored from one environment to another, such as when sending a percentage of production traffic to a testing or staging environment to vet a build before it is released to production.
  • Prometheus Exporter, which provides native support for exposing metrics to Prometheus, an open source system monitoring and alerting toolkit.
  • Additional features including Enhanced TCP Fast Open, Peers replication over TLS, Stick Tables Improvements, Priority-based Queuing, more flexible cache, Random and Power of Two Random Choice Load-Balancing Algorithms, Built-in Automatic Profiling, Self-healing via a watchdog, Log Distribution and Sampling, New Request Actions and New Converters, Early Hints, as well as other improvements, are described in more detail in the HAProxy 2.0 Blog.

The HAProxy Data Plane API represents another important advancement in extensibility for HAProxy, providing true dynamic configuration management in any environment. It provides a modern REST API for configuring HAProxy on the fly, including dynamically adding or removing frontends, backends and servers, creating ACL rules, inserting HTTP routing directives, and setting IP and port bindings.

The HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller is a community-driven project developed jointly by HAProxy Technologies that brings the power of HAProxy to Kubernetes-powered container environments. It allows Kubernetes clusters to route traffic to services with ease and supports TLS offloading, Layer 7 routing, rate limiting and whitelisting, all without sacrificing HAProxy’s best-in-class performance.

"As the advertising platform for the open Internet, we apply advanced machine learning to unparalleled data sets and need to deliver exceptional performance involving billions of QPS, with reliability and low latency," said William Dauchy, load balancing team lead at Criteo. "HAProxy has become a critical component in our fast-paced, event-driven application infrastructure, and we are extremely excited about HAProxy 2.0 and the HAProxy Data Plane API as they give us confidence that HAProxy will power our modern service mesh architecture moving forward towards edge computing."

“The importance of these new releases is that it allows HAProxy customers to have the best of both worlds - the same industry-leading performance, reliability and security that enterprises have come to expect combined with better support for modern application architectures, including cloud-native and containerized environments,” said Dujko Radovnikovic, CEO of HAProxy Technologies. “I would also like to thank the HAProxy community, including our own employees, for their tireless efforts in constantly delivering innovative and high-quality releases that power the uptime for thousands of companies across the globe.”

In recognition of the highly-active HAProxy community, the company also announced the inaugural HAProxyConf 2019 user conference, which will take place on November 12 and 13, 2019 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The conference will bring together hundreds of leading application delivery experts to share HAProxy best practices and real-world experiences. Anyone interested in speaking at HAProxyConf 2019 is welcome to submit an abstract as part of the call for papers process by visiting www.haproxyconf.com/call-for-papers.

For More Information:

HAProxy 2.0 Blog

HAProxy 2.0 Webinar Series

HAProxyConf 2019 User Conference

HAProxyConf 2019 Call for Papers

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About HAProxy Technologies

HAProxy Technologies is the company behind HAProxy, the world’s fastest and most widely used software load balancer. Rapidly deploy HAProxy products to deliver websites and applications with the utmost performance, reliability and security at any scale and in any environment. HAProxy Technologies is headquartered in Waltham, MA, with offices in France and Croatia. Learn more at HAProxy.com.


            

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