Managing your load balancer instances is important while using HAProxy. You might encounter errors, need to apply configurations, or periodically upgrade HAProxy to a newer version (to name a few examples). As a result, reloading or restarting HAProxy is often the secret ingredient to restoring intended functionality. Whether you’re relatively inexperienced with HAProxy or you’re a grizzled veteran, understanding which method is best in a given situation is crucial.

The curtain rose and fell on another spectacular Black Hat USA, the conference set against the backdrop of fabulous Las Vegas in the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. We knew upon hitting the Strip that all the glamor and neon lights were just the preshow for the main event: innovation and the latest in cybersecurity. We couldn’t wait to show attendees and fellow vendors what we had to offer.

HAProxy offers a powerful logging system that allows users to capture information about HTTP transactions. As part of that, logging headers provides insight into what's happening behind the scenes, such as when a web application firewall (WAF) blocks a request because of a problematic header. It can also be helpful when an application has trouble parsing a header, allowing you to review the logged headers to ensure that they conform to a specific format.

In case you missed it, HAProxy Technologies recently put out a press release about our stunning leadership position in G2’s Summer 2023 Grid® Reports for load balancing. We’re incredibly proud of these results, which are a direct result of the hard work and dedication of HAProxy’s community developers and our enterprise product and support teams. Looking at the Momentum Grid® Report for Load Balancing, the gap between HAProxy and the rest is impossible to ignore.

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.

In this article, we’ll take you on a quick tour of the new Lua event framework shipped with HAProxy 2.8—plus demonstrate how Lua helps you further customize HAProxy’s behavior. We’ll start with a brief, high-level overview of Lua and how HAProxy uses it. Next, we’ll introduce you to the Lua event framework, show you what you can do with it, and familiarize you with its mechanics.