Log Sampling is a powerful feature introduced in HAProxy 2.0 that lets you define a percentage of your logs to create a representative view of your data allowing you to minimize your costs. Log files are the key to observability. They can provide helpful information that can be used for debugging as well as analytics that can be used to understand how users interact with an application.

HAProxy can run in two different modes: TCP or HTTP. When operating in TCP mode, we say that it acts as a layer 4 proxy. In HTTP mode, we say that it acts as a layer 7 proxy. To understand the difference, you must first learn about the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, which helps IT pros conceptualize and explain where a piece of software fits in the context of a computer network.

VMware chose HAProxy as the default load balancer for Tanzu Kubernetes clusters, which helped streamline load balancing in their Kubernetes platform. VMware has delivered vSphere 7 with Tanzu, its endeavor to embed an enterprise-grade version of Kubernetes inside vSphere, the industry-leading compute virtualization platform.

HAProxy 2.3 adds exciting features such as forwarding, prioritizing,and translating of messages sent over the Syslog Protocol on both UDP and TCP, Stats Contexts, SSL/TLS enhancements, an improved cache, and changes in the connection layer that lay the foundation for support for HTTP/3 / QUIC. This release was truly a community effort and could not have been made possible without all of the hard work from everyone involved in active discussions on the mailing list and the HAProxy project GitHub.

The age of rendering most of a web page’s contents on the server and then delivering it as a colossal HTML file is fading into the past. Modern web frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue push towards creating components instead—individual elements on the page that fetch their data in the background and poll for asynchronous updates—which can be reused across your site.

HAProxy provides an easy and straightforward way to add HTTPS to your website. As a load balancer positioned in front of your web servers, it can handle all of the encryption and decryption duties, offloading those tasks from your upstream servers. That’s good because in today’s age of privacy awareness, the consensus is that every website must implement HTTPS, regardless of whether sensitive or private information is being exchanged.

Use the HAProxy load balancer to redirect users from HTTP to HTTPS automatically. For decades, our lives have become increasingly dependent on sending and receiving data from across the Internet. Now, with more people working, studying, and hanging with friends remotely, that trend is showing an uptick. Yet, adversaries seem to be grasping at that communication from every direction.

Set up custom error pages in HAProxy to ensure consistent, branded messaging that supports any backend web stack. The memory is probably still fresh: You’re shopping online at your favorite website, looking for something specific, you’ve got it narrowed down to two or maybe three products, you make the final decision, click to checkout and then— Internal Server Error. A cryptic error has replaced the page you were expecting. More than surprised, you feel knocked off balance.