Every load balancer you’ll find on the market must deliver performance, reliability, scalability, and security, and do it better than its competitors. Each must solve complex programming challenges that address those needs—choices that will affect the direction of the project for years to come. HAProxy is no different. When evaluating whether you should choose HAProxy or something else, it helps to know how project contributors answered the big, architectural questions.

When someone says a website is available, they mean that they can access that website. The application they’re trying to reach is up and working properly. High availability means that the website is up most of the time throughout the year. Companies can even put a percentage on this, striving for 100% availability, but typically getting somewhere a bit less, such as 99.9% or 99.99%.

Load balancing means splitting up network traffic so that you can distribute it evenly across a group of backend servers. For example, if you run two web servers, both hosting a copy of the same website, then you can balance the traffic across them, sending half to one and half to the other. The goal of load balancing is to increase the availability of your website or web-based application by routing a portion of requests to each server.

This post will be updated over the next several days. Recently, a Remote Code Execution vulnerability was discovered in the Apache Log4J library. This vulnerability, which is tracked in CVE-2021-44228, dubbed Log4Shell, allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on affected systems. While HAProxy Enterprise, HAProxy ALOHA, and other products within the HAProxy Technologies portfolio are not impacted by this (they do not use the Log4J library at all), you can use them to block the attack.

Register for our live webinar to learn more about this release. HAProxy 2.5 is now available! It adds improvements to a number of areas including better usability around setting variables, more descriptive error reporting and logging, and enhanced HTTP and WebSocket support. The HAProxy Runtime API has expanded its coverage of SSL-related commands and now includes the ability to add and remove CA files and revocation lists on-the-fly.

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.