Across two AWS Summit events in London and New York City, we had the chance to speak with more than 1,000 engineers. They came from startups building their first production stack, and enterprises managing large AWS and multi-cloud deployments. The energy was exactly what you'd expect: major AWS launches, dozens of new service announcements, wall-to-wall cloud conversations. And HAProxy right in the middle of it.
We were there to talk about HAProxy One, the world’s fastest application delivery and security platform. It puts load balancing, next-gen security layers, Kubernetes routing, and API gateway in a single stack. HAProxy Enterprise is the data plane: it processes the traffic. HAProxy Fusion is the control plane: it handles management, observability, automation, and integration with the infrastructure around it. HAProxy Edge is the global edge network: it provides fully managed application delivery services from a global low-latency network.
As we spoke to attendees, four clear themes kept coming up. These are patterns from real booth conversations with engineers across company sizes, industries, and cloud maturity levels. Each pattern reveals a technical challenge and a business need that HAProxy One is a great fit for:
Integration with AWS
Portability across infrastructure
Consolidation of tool-sprawl (especially in security)
Pricing that helps you scale
1. Designed to work on AWS
The engineers we spoke to wanted tools designed to work in the AWS environment. Third-party tools that require significant integration work lose before they start.
AWS-native services like ALB and AWS WAF work out of the box. Everything else can feel bolted on. Engineers want the performance and flexibility of best-of-breed tooling, without the operational friction.
One question came up in various forms: "How does your product integrate with AWS?" This was an understandable pre-qualification question. If the answer wasn't convincing, the conversation moved on.
Fortunately, HAProxy One provides scalable AWS load balancing and security:
HAProxy Fusion Control Plane connects directly with AWS Route 53, and supports Auto Scaling Group awareness for load balancing with HAProxy Enterprise.
Hardened AWS AMIs for HAProxy Enterprise ship with automatic HAProxy Fusion registration.
Native support for Graviton instances, with performance measured at over 2 million HTTPS requests per second on Graviton2.
SSL/TLS processing with AWS-LC cryptography delivers up to 2X the TLS performance of OpenSSL 3+.
HAProxy Enterprise is in the AWS Solutions Library, co-validated and architecturally integrated with the platform.
HAProxy is built to live inside an AWS environment without being dependent on it.
2. Cloud-neutral and infrastructure-agnostic
The engineers who sounded most nervous were the ones with the most mature AWS environments and the deepest integration, who faced the biggest impact if something were to change.
Those who have built on AWS for years know that every AWS-native architectural decision is a sunk cost that makes the next one harder to reverse. They want full AWS integration today without closing the door on tomorrow.
More than one engineer said something to this effect: they were all-in on AWS right now, but they'd been all-in on things before, and they knew how those stories could end. So they can’t afford to be locked into one environment. Any assets they can carry over to another cloud or on-premises data centers has more long-term value.
HAProxy suits this approach. It runs the same platform, with the same configuration and behavior, in any environment: on-prem, AWS, GCP, Azure, bare metal, VMs, and Kubernetes. No proprietary APIs, no “migration tax” when architecture evolves.
Engineers were asking for exactly this: for any application, on any infrastructure, without compromise.
3. One unified platform to replace many tools
Security was the number-one conversation starter at the NYC booth, and the most common frustration was that securing an AWS application typically means running multiple products. A load balancer here, a WAF somewhere else. Then a third product for DDoS, each with its own console and its own incident playbook. Each additional tool adds operational overhead. It also adds a network hop in the request path, and the latency cost compounds. So does the attack surface between integrations.
AWS makes it easy to add another managed service. The bill and the complexity grow together. Several engineers described sprawl they'd built one service at a time and were now trying to rationalize.
The billing complexity was a specific frustration, but the deeper concern was decision overhead. Every additional capability engineers needed as they grew meant evaluating a new tool, budgeting for it separately, and absorbing the operational cost of adding it to their deployment. Sprawl is the inevitable outcome when each problem gets its own product.
HAProxy One puts load balancing, WAF, bot management, DDoS protection, Kubernetes ingress and routing, and API gateway in a single platform. All of it runs through one data plane in the traffic path, managed by one sovereign control plane (that you deploy and manage).
The HAProxy Enterprise WAF, powered by the Intelligent WAF Engine, delivers exceptional balanced accuracy and ultra-low latency, so consolidation doesn't require compromising on security or performance. The HAProxy Enterprise Bot Management Module, powered by the Threat Detection Engine, stops complex, high-impact threats including application layer DDoS, brute force attacks, web scrapers, and vulnerability scanners. These powerful security layers run locally with no external connection, keeping your traffic and telemetry private.
Can one product excel in all these categories, without compromise? Well, that’s what more than 900 verified user reviews on G2 tell us. In the latest G2 Summer 2026 Grid® Reports, HAProxy received a perfect Satisfaction Score of 100, and was named a Leader in Load Balancing, WAF, DDoS Protection, Container Networking, and API Management.
A unified stack is faster to operate, harder to misconfigure, and reduces the cost and complexity of decisions as you grow.
4. Pricing that makes sense at scale
Consumption-based pricing works in the early stages. At scale, it stops working for the customer.
Any traffic spike (usually good news) comes with a matching bill (bad news). DDoS events and high-volume API endpoints are no different. The engineers most exposed to this problem are exactly the ones who've succeeded most. High-traffic applications protected by AWS WAF and load-balanced by ALB are billed per request or per connection, and at scale that adds up fast.
Several engineers described the experience of a strong traffic month where their security bill scaled with it at exactly the same rate — growth penalized by the model designed to protect it. Their eyes would light up at the thought of flat, predictable pricing.
HAProxy is instance-based: you pay for the instance, not the traffic. No per-request fees, no bill surprises during high-traffic events. At scale, the TCO advantage over consumption-priced alternatives is substantial and compounds.
There's a longer-term dimension here as well. Pricing predictability is partly a vendor stability question. HAProxy is independently owned and profitable, not subject to the acquisition cycles that have repriced infrastructure for a lot of teams over the last few years.
Cloud and AI without compromise
These four themes aren't coincidental. Engineers see immense value in building on AWS, but they are also keenly aware of the trade-offs that come with investing heavily in one environment.
They want to build well, not just build fast. Depth without dependency. Consolidation without compromise. Pricing that rewards growth and success. That's what HAProxy One is built to deliver.
These factors are particularly useful for engineers building internal AI infrastructure: load balancing across GPU clusters, routing requests to the right model, handling inference traffic at scale. Engineers want to know whether their infrastructure will be agile and scalable enough to keep up, without introducing dozens of new components.
The good news is the traffic management fundamentals that HAProxy excels at — intelligent routing, integrated security, and performance efficiency — apply directly to AI inference. HAProxy is already the load balancing layer in production AI deployments: NVIDIA Run:ai v2.24 recommends HAProxy for the Kubernetes ingress controller, and Anyscale documented an 11.1X throughput improvement using HAProxy with Ray Serve.
The engineering fundamentals don't change when the payload is a prompt.
If you want to see HAProxy One in action, contact our team to schedule a demo and a consultation.
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