One of the most anticipated presentations at HAProxyConf 2025 came from gaming and user-generated content (UGC) innovators Roblox. Software Engineer Chris Jones and Senior Site Reliability Engineer Ben Meidel gave an enthusiastic and enjoyable presentation, detailing their journey from legacy hardware to a sophisticated, automated, and secure application delivery platform, with seamless, API-powered dynamic configuration and upgrades, supported by the HAProxy Enterprise Dynamic Update Module.
Their story provides a powerful blueprint for any organization that must deal with hyperscale growth efficiently, while maintaining robust security throughout.
Scale matters
Roblox uses HAProxy Enterprise as the gateway for external traffic to their edge data centers, powering an agile, engineering-led DevOps environment, allowing for stable operations and rapid scaling to support hot new experiences. Scalability, a core feature of HAProxy Enterprise, is also supported by the stellar performance of the HAProxy Enterprise WAF (see video).
Scalability is crucial to Roblox (and many other UGC hosts). A recent public filing showed that daily active users have increased beyond the 97.8 million cited in the talk to 111.8 million users. Engagement was up nearly 60% year over year.
One new game, Grow a Garden, drew 30 million simultaneous users recently. “Out of nowhere, my boys have become expert virtual gardeners,” says one proud mother on LinkedIn. Rapid growth depends on smooth, glitch-free operation for users — even as new users are flooding into a popular game.
This rapid, efficient scaling would not have been possible under the limitations of their previous load balancing infrastructure, setting the stage for a dramatic shift.
HAProxy Enterprise powers innovation
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Roblox used F5 hardware appliances for load balancing. However, "tremendous user growth" as people were stuck at home during the pandemic revealed the limits of their setup. The physical load balancers were inflexible and "no longer cost-effective."
Credit: “Scaling Years of Growth in One Week - Roblox” from Canonical Ubuntu
In a video on the Canonical Ubuntu channel on YouTube, a Roblox engineer expanded on these limitations:
Inflexible scaling: The cluster-based model meant that when a cluster became overwhelmed, a new cluster had to be manually deployed, which "didn't scale".
Manual and complex configuration: The initial configuration was done "by hand" with no automation for adding new VIPs , and the vendor's automation framework required "full submission to their technology to scale the way that we wanted to".
Cost and slow delivery: The cost of the deployment began to "exceed the value that it's actually providing" , and acquiring new physical chassis could take "up to six weeks" when capacity crunches occurred.
This forced a strategic shift to a software-based solution. Roblox evaluated its options and chose HAProxy as its “load-balancing solution of choice,” featuring "fantastic performance." The move solved their immediate scaling and cost problems.
It also set the stage for the next phase of their infrastructure evolution. Roblox has innovated on top of HAProxy Enterprise to create its own internal, self-service solution, Roblox Load Balancer (RLB). RLB is based on the HAProxy Enterprise Docker container, “a convenient base image that is easy to manage and deploy,” orchestrated with HashiCorp Nomad.
RLB allows service owners to self-register and configure their own load balancing settings—such as choosing between round-robin or least-connection algorithms—simply by adding tags to their service registry. Running on Nomad makes the system "self-recovering," automatically rescheduling failed instances to prevent any loss of capacity and taking advantage of the rock-solid reliability of HAProxy Enterprise.
Leveraging core features for the win
Specific features of HAProxy Enterprise have helped Roblox create a powerful enterprise solution that delivers one of the most robust, capable, and fun user environments in the world.
Dynamic updates for GitOps integration
HAProxy Enterprise Dynamic Updates “allow you to update the contents of some things, like map files, without needing to reload HAProxy. Very handy.” Figure 1 shows a slide from the Roblox presentation, describing how they use the HAProxy Enterprise Dynamic Update Module.
The HAProxy Dynamic Update module plays a central role at Roblox
With dynamic updates, a pull request in GitHub drives a change to a map table, and GitHub Actions sync the file to a Consul key-value store, where HAProxy instances fetch it — with no reload. This enables traffic splitting and service migrations for hundreds of services, with zero team intervention.
High-performance security
The HAProxy Enterprise Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a “single, centralized security solution” with “great logs and metrics,” replacing inconsistent tools. Roblox uses the Dynamic Update pipeline to enable safe, gradual WAF deployments. The security team can onboard a service or ramp up enforcement by using a pull request to change a value in a map file — again, with no reloads. This leads to "very reassured and very happy service owners.”
In a lively Q&A, Roblox praised the WAF’s performance efficiency and ultra-low latency.
Outstanding observability
Roblox describes HAProxy’s stick tables as “flexible, high-performance key-value stores built into HAProxy.” And HAProxy Enterprise’s Global Profiling Engine (GPE) allows them to “collect and aggregate ... stick table data across HAProxy instances and clusters, providing a more unified setup.”
Docker container
The HAProxy Enterprise Docker Container is very popular among HAProxy Enterprise features. Customers are increasingly orchestrating their environment with Kubernetes, Nomad, and other powerful platforms. Containers make it easy to modify HAProxy Enterprise in a visible and manageable manner. And the Docker container is always up-to-date, so it contains the latest and greatest code, along with security patches and feature updates. Roblox had been building and maintaining their own container; now, HAProxy Enterprise gives them an updated, tested, reliable, supported version.
Customer support
The team praised HAProxy Technologies’s customer support, noting that it is a "huge relief to just be able to ask someone who intimately knows the software for input.” When a new vulnerability is announced, “there is nothing more reassuring than knowing that we're already protected thanks to WAF.” And the Roblox team would “recommend partnering with HAProxy Technologies for getting sanity checks on configurations.”
Automating the build pipeline
Roblox has even automated the deployment of updates to HAProxy itself. They’ve used GitHub Actions to create a full CI/CD build pipeline. Every day, they pull the latest HAProxy Enterprise Docker Container and deploy it to a canary fleet, 5% of the total. They monitor key metrics, using custom tracking they have developed in-house. Once successful, the build is promoted to the entire production fleet.
Conclusion: a blueprint for modern application delivery
Roblox moved from a reactive, hardware-based model to a proactive, software-defined platform, with HAProxy providing foundational technology. Roblox leverages HAProxy's performance and efficiency, its containerized ecosystem, and the advanced features of HAProxy Enterprise. The HAProxy-powered Roblox system can handle the unpredictable demands of a global gaming platform, proving that it is possible to achieve performance, security, and agility at hyperscale.
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