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!

Many of you use HashiCorp Consul for service discovery. It makes connecting one backend application or service to another easy: Your Consul servers store a catalog of addresses to all of your services; when an application within the network wants to discover where a service is listening, it asks Consul, which gives it the address.

For the first time, a software load balancer exceeds 2-million RPS on a single Arm instance. A few weeks ago, while I was working on an HAProxy issue related to thread locking contention, I found myself running some tests on a server with an 8-core, 16-thread Intel Xeon W2145 processor that we have in our lab. Although my intention wasn’t to benchmark the proxy, I observed HAProxy reach 1.03 million HTTP requests per second.