Run your HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller in External mode to reduce network hops and latency. Traditionally, you would run the HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller as a pod inside your Kubernetes cluster. As a pod, it has access to other pods because they share the same pod-level network. That allows it to route and load balance traffic to applications running inside pods, but the challenge is how to connect traffic from outside the cluster to the ingress controller in the first place.

HAProxy with the HAProxy Data Plane API can integrate with Consul to enable service discovery for your load balancer configuration.

HAProxy generates over a hundred metrics to give you a nearly real-time view of the state of your load balancers and the services they proxy, but to get the most from this data, you need a way to visualize it. InfluxData’s InfluxDB suite of applications takes the many discrete data points that make up HAProxy metrics and turns them into time-series data, which is then collected and graphed, giving you insight into the workings of your systems and services.

HAProxy 2.4 adds exciting features such as support for HTTP/2 WebSockets, authorization and routing of MQTT and FIX (Financial Information Exchange) protocol messages, DNS resolution over TCP, server timeouts that you can change on the fly, dynamic SSL certificate storage for client certificates sent to backend servers, and an improved cache; it adds a built-in OpenTracing integration, new Prometheus metrics, and circuit breaking improvements.

The HAProxy Data Plane API 2.3 expands its service discovery mechanisms and introduces native support for discovering AWS EC2 instances and auto-scaling groups. It also adds a new configuration file that supports HCL and YAML, an Inotify configuration watcher, and Syslog support. HAProxy Data Plane API version 2.3 is now available and you will find it in the 2.3 version of the Alpine Docker image.

We’re proud to announce the release version 1.6 of the HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller. This version provides the ability to add raw configuration snippets to HAProxy frontends, allows for ACL/Map files to be managed through a ConfigMap, and enables complex routing decisions to be made based on anything found within the request headers or metadata.

One of the greatest strengths of containers is the ability to spin more of them up quickly. As the volume of traffic to your application increases, you can create more application containers on the fly to handle it, in almost no time at all. Kubernetes ships with autoscaling baked in, giving you the power to scale out when the system detects an increase in traffic—automatically!