AWS re:Invent 2024 has officially wrapped up, but not everything that happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. We're still gushing over the reception our booth team received from attendees—and we were excited to see even more organizations going all-in on application delivery and security. Naturally, AWS integration was a constant backdrop throughout the week as we showcased the HAProxy platform.

HAProxy ALOHA 16.5 is now available, and we’re delighted to share that this release includes one of the cornerstone security features announced earlier this year—the new Bot Management Module. HAProxy ALOHA customers will also benefit from the new Network Management CLI, secure Wireguard VPN synchronization between appliances, updated root filesystem packages, and the features announced in open source HAProxy 3.0.

Back in the spotlight, HAProxy 3.1 builds on its history of innovation, delivering improvements that ensure it remains the go-to open source load balancer! As usual, all the features announced in this release will be incorporated into the next enterprise release (HAProxy Enterprise 3.1). HAProxy 3.1 brings improvements to observability, reliability, performance, and flexibility. So everything we love about HAProxy is now even better!

Though KubeCon North America 2024 has officially come to a close, the CNCF's flagship event has left us buzzing with residual excitement. After all, waving goodbye to a crowd of 9,200+ attendees is never easy—especially with Salt Lake City's snow-capped mountains towering impressively in the background. However, it was our conversations with HAProxy booth visitors that truly stole the show.

HAProxy Enterprise 3.0 is now available. This release extends HAProxy Enterprise’s legendary performance and flexibility and builds upon its cornerstone features. The HAProxy Enterprise WAF is even more powerful, the Global Profiling Engine is more dynamic and performant, UDP load balancing is simpler and more observable, HTTPS performance is improved, and we have added new CAPTCHA and SAML single sign-on modules.

This month, Fortune.com reported that TikTok’s web scraper — known as Bytespider — is aggressively sucking up content to fuel generative AI models. We noticed the same thing when looking at bot management analytics produced by HAProxy Edge — our global network that we ourselves use to serve traffic for haproxy.com. Some of the numbers we are seeing are fairly shocking, so let’s review the traffic sources and where they originate.

HAProxy Fusion 1.3 is now available—making it even simpler to adopt modern, scalable application delivery. New custom dashboards, high-performance Kubernetes service discovery, and optimized workflows bolster HAProxy Fusion's observability and flexibility.

Standardized logging formats are important for teams that rely on logging for observability, troubleshooting, and workflow integration. Using structured formats simplifies parsing and eliminates the need to interpret fields manually, ensuring consistency across logging formats. This reduces manual work, prevents brittleness from unstructured logs, and simplifies integration between teams that feed logs into a shared aggregation system.