The Kubernetes networking landscape is shifting. The traditional Kubernetes Ingress approach is being complemented and, in some cases, replaced by a more powerful, flexible, and extensible standard: the Kubernetes Gateway API. Kubernetes has become the go-to platform for orchestrating and managing containerized applications. A key aspect of Kubernetes that's crucial for the functionality of these applications? Networking.

SysOps teams know how crucial observability is to maintaining around-the-clock infrastructure health. And while HAProxy already provides reliable logging and stats (for diagnostics and monitoring), what if you could supplement those with a real-time alerting system? That idea inspired our initial inclusion of mailers in HAProxy. Since then, users have been asking for deeper mailer customizability—and we’re thrilled to deliver that with Lua-based email alerts in HAProxy 2.8.

TLS certificates are crucial for the secure flow of web traffic, but managing these digital certificates can pose a challenge. Using an ACME-based certificate authority like Let’s Encrypt can automate and simplify the management of issuing these certificates. Certificate management in HAProxy has steadily improved over the years, allowing it to become more flexible and load certificates without restarting.

We are proud to announce that we have released HAProxy Data Plane API 2.8, available on our GitHub page. This release follows the recent HAProxy 2.8 release and incorporates its changes, along with some improvements and changes specific to the API. HAProxy Data Plane API 2.8 adds new keywords focused on QUIC, OCSP stapling, and tuning options that allow you to customize your HAProxy process using the HTTP REST API programmatically.