Willy Tarreau, the founder of the HAProxy load balancer, 20 years past its initial, open-source release, still guides the project, often submitting code patches and writing long and meticulous replies on the community forum. Over the years, he has been joined by a cast of regular contributors, but also newcomers. This collaboration has kept the project evolving over time. In this interview, Willy describes his views on the success of the project, and how it grew over the years.

Version 2.4 improves its e2e tests, revamps how logging in the HAProxy Data Plane API works, adds support for namespace filtering in Consul Service Discovery, improves runtime capabilities for maps and ACLs, adds server-template support and adds log_targets to global and defaults sections.

We’re proud to announce the release of version 1.7 of the HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller! In this release, we added support for custom resource definitions that cover most of the configuration settings. Definitions are available for the global, defaults and backend sections of the configuration. This promotes a cleaner separation of concerns between the different groups of settings and strengthens validation of those settings.

It’s almost wild how two years have passed already since we first announced the HAProxy Ingress Controller for Kubernetes. Note that this project is different from the jcmoraisjr/haproxy-ingress HAProxy ingress controller project on GitHub. Our project is also an open-source project, but it is overseen by engineers at HAProxy Technologies, which has allowed us to streamline its release cycle.

HAProxy provides active, passive, and agent health checks. HAProxy makes your web applications highly available by spreading requests across a pool of backend servers. If one or even several servers fail, clients can still use your app as long as there are other servers still running. The caveat is, HAProxy needs to know which servers are healthy. That’s why health checks are crucial.

Add IP-by-IP rate limiting to the HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller. DDoS (distributed denial of service) events occur when an attacker or group of attackers flood your application or API with disruptive traffic, hoping to exhaust its resources and prevent it from functioning properly. Bots and scrapers, too, can misbehave, making far more requests than is reasonable.

Learn how to test your HAProxy Configuration. Properly testing your HAProxy configuration file is a simple, yet crucial part of administering your load balancer. Remembering to run one simple command after making a change to your configuration file can save you from unintentionally stopping your load balancer and bringing down your services.

The HAProxy load balancer provides a set of APIs for configuring it programmatically. Although many people enjoy the simplicity of configuring their HAProxy load balancer by directly editing its configuration file, /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg, others want a way to do it without logging into the server. Or, they want a way that integrates with bespoke software. For example, they want to add pools of servers to the load balancer programmatically as a part of their CI/CD deployment pipeline.

Learn how to Install HAProxy on Ubuntu 20.04. Ubuntu 20.04 is a great choice for installing your HAProxy software load balancer. It’s a free Linux operating system that’s fast, secure, and best of all, it’s easy to use. One of the features that makes Ubuntu so accessible to even the newest of users is its package manager, apt , the Advanced Packaging Tool.

If you are using HAProxy 2.0 or newer, it is important that you update to the latest version. A vulnerability was found that makes it possible to abuse the HTTP/2 parser, allowing an attacker to prepend hostnames to a request, append top-level domains to an existing domain, and inject invalid characters through the :method pseudo-header.