Knowledge Base | Basics
Fundamentals: What Sets Containers Apart from Virtual Machines
Containers have fast become one of the most efficient ways of virtually deploying applications, offering more agility than a virtual machine (VM) can typically provide. Both containers and VMs are great tools for managing resources and application deployment, but what...
Fundamentals: Application Acceleration and the Benefits for your Service Delivery
Application acceleration is all about improving the responsiveness of a digital service. When clients access web applications, they are expecting near-immediate feedback from servers. Maintaining that level of performance requires ensuring the right resources are...
Fundamentals: What is an API Gateway?
When talking about managing web applications and the services they provide, the term “API gateway” is often thrown around, but what does it mean? In order to unpack how a gateway functions, we first need to understand what an API is. Application Programming Interface...
Fundamentals: Load Balancing and the Right Distribution Algorithm for You
With the right load balancing in place, the demand of increasing web traffic can become manageable, but how do you determine which load balancing algorithm is best suited for your applications? Does the ease of use of static load balancing better suit the services you...
Fundamentals: High Availability and the Role of a Reverse Proxy
HAProxy. High availability and a reverse proxy–it’s in the name, but what does it all mean? Before understanding how the two concepts work together in the load balancing space, we need to unpack the basics of high availability and how a reverse proxy functions. In...
Path-based Routing with HAProxy
If you host dozens of web services that reside at various subdomains, TCP ports, and paths, then migrating them to live under a single address could simplify how clients access them and make your job of managing access easier. It would mean moving from a hodgepodge of...
Log Forwarding with HAProxy and Syslog
Developing a strategy for collecting application-level logs necessitates stepping back and looking at the big picture. Engineers developing the applications may only see logging at its ground level: the code that writes the event to the log—for example a function that...
Enable Sticky Sessions in HAProxy
HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the protocol that defines the language browsers use to communicate with web servers, is stateless, meaning that after you make a web request and a server sends back a response, no memory of that interaction remains. To make anything...
How Load Balancing Improves the Performance of Your Applications
Load balancing is an indispensable technique for improving a website's performance. I'll explain why. With Firefox's Web Developer Tools open, I visited a popular retailer's website to see how many HTTP requests my browser made when loading the site. In this case, I...
![[On-Demand Webinar] HAProxy Skills Lab: Health Checking Servers](https://cdn.haproxy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Webinar-Health-Checking-Servers-HAProxy-1-1000x500.png)
[On-Demand Webinar] HAProxy Skills Lab: Health Checking Servers
A common misconception is that load balancing is enough to achieve high availability. That is only true when you factor in one, very important feature: health checks! Health checks monitor your servers for issues. If a server loses connectivity or begins returning...
