HAProxy announced the launch of HAProxy 3.0, the leading industry free & open-source world’s fastest and most utilized load balancer and proxy for TCP and HTTP-based applications.
Indeed, this field has several key players, such as the cloud-focused Traefik, a major competitor. At the same time, the rising star Caddy and the favorite among self-hosting enthusiasts, NPM, are also noteworthy options.
However, when it comes to enterprise solutions, HAProxy leads the pack. It recently surpassed the impressive one billion downloads on Docker Hub, which is proof enough of this.
The just released 3.0 version brings many new features, thus improving performance, security, and flexibility across various digital ecosystems. The major ones are:
- Enhanced Certificate Management: The introduction of the
crt-storeconfiguration section revolutionizes SSL certificate storage and usage, replacingcrt-listand offering a more structured approach with aliases for easier certificate referencing. - HTTP/2 Optimization: Addressing HTTP/2’s intricacies, HAProxy now features mechanisms to limit problematic requests and improve service reliability by tracking and managing glitchy connections.
- Persistent Stats and GUID Assignment: The new
guiddirective ensures continuous tracking of configuration objects across sessions, facilitating statistics persistence even after the system reloads. - Syslog Load Balancing and Logging Improvements: Syslog message handling has been enhanced with weighted server lines and new logging formats in JSON and CBOR, providing more flexibility and structured data management.
- Advanced Fetch Methods: Additional fetch methods have been introduced, revealing data points previously accessible only within logs, which enhances data-driven decision-making and system monitoring.
Apart from these, however, we should also note:
- Lua Scripting Performance: A reengineered loading mechanism promises significant speed improvements for single-threaded Lua scripts.
- Stick Table Enhancements: Redesigned locking mechanisms in stick tables drastically improve performance, especially on systems with high thread counts.
- Flexible TLS Management: New directives allow default and conditional TLS certificate selection, streamlining operations for multiple hosted sites.
- Enhanced Traffic Prioritization: Adjustments to the Differentiated Services (DS) field and
fwmarksettings enable refined traffic management and prioritization at both the front end and the back end.
There are also some breaking changes. For example, HAProxy 3.0 enhances command processing to prevent the execution of multiple simultaneous commands, addressing potential inconsistencies. Moreover, the previously ignored enabled keyword for dynamic servers is now actively rejected to avoid configuration errors.
HAProxy 3.0 can be installed via Docker or compiled from the source for those eager to try the new release. For more information about all changes, refer to the release announcement, review the changelog, or visit its management guide.
