Knowledge Base

Welcome to HAProxy’s extensive and ever-expanding knowledge base. Created by a team of experts including HAProxy’s Core Development Team; it covers a wide range of topics to help you achieve maximum potential.

Security

Application-Layer DDoS Attack Protection with HAProxy

HAProxy’s high-performance security capabilities are utilized as a key line of defense by many of the world’s top enterprises. Application-layer DDoS attacks are aimed at overwhelming an application with requests or connections, and in this post we will show you how...

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Load Balancing/Routing

Serving ECC and RSA Certificates on Same IP with HAProxy

ECC and RSA certificates and HTTPS To keep this practical, we will not go into theory of ECC or RSA certificates. Let's just mention that ECC certificates can provide as much security as RSA with much lower key size, meaning much lower computation requirements on the...

Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) Load-Balancing

Microsoft Remote Desktop services (RDS) Remote Desktop Services, formerly Terminal Services, is a technology from Microsoft that allows users to access remotely to a session-based desktop, virtual machine-based desktop or applications hosted in a datacenter from their...

Web Application Name to Backend Mapping in HAProxy

Synopsis Let's take a web application platform where many HTTP Host header points to. Of course, this platform hosts many backends and HAProxy is used to perform content switching based on the Host header to route HTTP traffic to each backend. HAProxy map HAProxy 1.5...

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SSL

Let’s Encrypt (ACMEv2) for HAProxy

HAProxy Technologies is proud to announce the availability of an integrated Let’s Encrypt ACMEv2 Lua client for HAProxy and HAProxy Enterprise Edition (HAPEE). HAPEE comes bundled with Lua support in a precompiled binary conveniently distributed using your Linux...

TLS 1.3 and 0-RTT in HAProxy

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol that enables secure communications over a computer network. It has been in widespread use on the Internet for various services, such as e-commerce, web browsing, and instant messaging. TLS has also been made...

SSL Client Certificate Information in HTTP Headers and Logs

HAProxy and SSL HAProxy has many nice features when speaking about SSL, despite SSL has been introduced in it lately. One of those features is the client side certificate management, which has already been discussed on the blog. One thing was missing in the article,...

SSL Offloading Impact on Web Applications

SSL Offloading Nowadays, it is common (and convenient) to use the Load-Balancer SSL capabilities to cypher/uncypher traffic from clients to the web application platform. Performing SSL at the Load-Balancer Layer is called "SSL offloading", because you offload this...

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Microservices

Using HAProxy as an API Gateway, Part 1 [Introduction]

An API gateway handles load balancing, security, rate limiting, monitoring, and other cross-cutting concerns for API services. Read on to learn how HAProxy Enterprise excels as an API gateway. “Danger! Avalanche Area” is a sign you’ll see when you drive through some...

HAProxy and Consul with DNS for Service Discovery

In this blog post we will show you a zero-touch method for integrating HAProxy with Consul by using DNS for service discovery available in HAProxy 1.8. HAProxy is the most widely used software load balancer in the world, well known for being extremely fast and...

DNS for Service Discovery in HAProxy

HAProxy Technologies’ R&D has released a patchset that allows DNS to be utilized for service discovery in HAProxy. The patchset has already been merged into the HAProxy 1.8 development branch and will soon be backported to HAProxy Enterprise Edition 1.7r2. HAProxy is...

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Performance

Multithreading in HAProxy

There are two possible ways to have HAProxy run on multiple CPU cores: By using the multiprocess model, where HAProxy automatically starts a number of separate system processes (method available since HAProxy version 1.1.7) By using the multithreading model, where...

Webinars

[On Demand Webinar] What’s New in HAProxy Enterprise Edition 1.8r1

HAProxy Enterprise Edition 1.8r1 contains a number of powerful improvements in performance and application acceleration, significant improvements in dynamic capabilities for cloud and microservices environments, and an enterprise suite of add-ons that help enterprises...

[On Demand Webinar] HAProxy’s Dynamic Capabilities

Responding to the need for an application delivery controller to be fully dynamic, HAProxy Technologies invested a lot of resources into developing HAProxy's Runtime API and the LB-update module. In this webinar, we will demonstrate the abilities of the Runtime API...

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Basics

The Four Essential Sections of an HAProxy Configuration

An HAProxy configuration file guides the behavior of your HAProxy load balancer. In this post, we demonstrate its four most essential sections. There are four essential sections to an HAProxy configuration file. They are global, defaults, frontend, and backend. These...

Introduction to HAProxy Maps

An HAProxy map file stores key-value pairs and is the starting point for some inventive behavior including dynamic rate limiting and blue-green deployments. Dictionaries. Maps. Hashes. Associative arrays. Can you imagine life without these wonderful key-value data...

Introduction to HAProxy Stick Tables

HTTP requests are stateless by design. However, this raises some questions regarding how to track user activities, including malicious ones, across requests so that you can collect metrics, block users, and make other decisions based on state. The only way to track...

Introduction to HAProxy ACLs

An HAProxy ACL lets you define custom rules for blocking malicious requests, choosing backends, redirecting to HTTPS and using cached objects. See The Webinar: Introduction to HAProxy ACLs: Building Rules for Dynamically Routing Requests, Redirecting Users and...

Benchmarking

Benchmarking SSL Performance

Introduction The story Recently, there has been some attacks against website which aimed to steal user identity. In order to protect their users, major website owners had to find a solution. Unfortunately, we know that sometimes, improving security means downgrading...

Random Tips

HAProxy and HTTP Errors 408 in Chrome

Lately, there was some discussions on HAProxy's mailing list about 408 errors printed in Chrome browsers. Origin of 408 errors 408 is the status code used by web servers or proxies when the client has not sent a whole HTTP request during a certain period of time. It...

Configure syslog-ng to Log Readable HTTP URL from HAProxy

This tips is provided by Exosec. Exosec provides a very good monitoring product called POM, based on Nagios with very strong value added such as very simple administration, application monitoring, etc... For some of their project, they use either HAProxy or the ALOHA...

HAProxy and gzip Compression

Synopsis Compression is a Technic to reduce object size to reduce delivery delay for objects over HTTP protocol. Until now, HAProxy did not include such feature. But the guys at HAProxy Technologies worked hard on it (mainly David Du Colombier and @wlallemand)....

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Observability

Binary Health Check with HAProxy 1.5: PHP-fpm/fastcgi Probe Example

Application layer health checking Health checking is the ability to probe a server to ensure the service is up and running. This is one of the root feature of any load-balancer. One can probe servers and services at different layer of the OSI model: * ARP check (not...

HAProxy Advanced Redis Health Check

Introduction Redis is an opensource nosql database working on a key/value model. One interesting feature in Redis is that it is able to write data to disk as well as a master can synchronize many slaves. HAProxy can load-balance Redis servers with no issues at all....

DevOps

Hitless Reloads with HAProxy – HOWTO

Our R&D department published a well-received blog post titled “Truly Seamless Reloads with HAProxy – No More Hacks!”. In it, we explained why some established connections could be dropped during reloads under high utilization, and how the problem has been solved in...

Dynamic Configuration with the HAProxy Runtime API

In this blog post, you'll learn how to dynamically configure HAProxy using the Runtime API. To learn more about the HAProxy configuration, see our blog post The Four Essential Sections of an HAProxy Configuration. Over the past 15 years, HAProxy has become well known...

Truly Seamless Reloads with HAProxy – No More Hacks!

Summary HAProxy Technologies' R&D has released a patchset to enable seamless reloads of HAProxy without dropping packets in the process. The patchset has already been merged into the HAProxy 1.8 development branch and will soon be backported to HAProxy Enterprise...

Kubernetes

HAProxy Ingress Controller for Kubernetes

Cloud-based applications have seen a great uptake in recent years, and that is especially true for microservices-based apps and related orchestration frameworks. These types of applications create needs for load balancing in new contexts, and here at HAProxy...

Service Discovery

HAProxy and Consul with DNS for Service Discovery

In this blog post we will show you a zero-touch method for integrating HAProxy with Consul by using DNS for service discovery available in HAProxy 1.8. HAProxy is the most widely used software load balancer in the world, well known for being extremely fast and...

DNS for Service Discovery in HAProxy

HAProxy Technologies’ R&D has released a patchset that allows DNS to be utilized for service discovery in HAProxy. The patchset has already been merged into the HAProxy 1.8 development branch and will soon be backported to HAProxy Enterprise Edition 1.7r2. HAProxy is...

Cloud

HAProxy on AWS: Best Practices Part 2

Placing HAProxy at the edge of your AWS infrastructure is possible without involving Elastic Load Balancing (ELB). In this article, we’ll discuss how. This blog post is part of a series. See Part 1 here.   There is such a thing as too many layers. There’s a restaurant...

HAProxy on AWS: Best Practices Part 1

This blog post is part of our AWS Best Practices series. See Part 2 here. There has been a constant stream of interest in running high-availability HAProxy configurations on Amazon. There are a few different approaches possible, and this is the first in a series of...

LUA

Let’s Encrypt (ACMEv2) for HAProxy

HAProxy Technologies is proud to announce the availability of an integrated Let’s Encrypt ACMEv2 Lua client for HAProxy and HAProxy Enterprise Edition (HAPEE). HAPEE comes bundled with Lua support in a precompiled binary conveniently distributed using your Linux...

HAProxy 1.6-Dev1 and LUA

HAProxy 1.6-dev1 Yesterday, Willy has released HAProxy 1.6-dev1: ANNOUNCE HAProxy 1.6-dev1. This version contains many new features and core improvements. Amongst the new features, one is LUA, contributed by Thierry (HAProxy Technologies developer). NOTE: We invite...

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