F5 states that the "brain" of the BIG-IP platform, Local Traffic Manager (LTM) intelligently manages network traffic so applications are always fast, available, and secure.
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HAProxy Community Edition
Score 9.3 out of 10
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HAProxy Community Edition is a free, open source reverse-proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is presented as suited for very high traffic web sites.
There was a need to have the DR environment to be available actively but not to send the traffic unless the production is down The F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) priority feature helped achieving it. It was well suited in handling the HTTP headers using polices and iRules. It was less appropriate from the application security perspective in the current version. But after attending the AppWorld 2024, I see a lot of ways to protect the network and the application with several features.
It prevents a single server failure from being a downtime event by adding redundancy to every layer of your architecture. A load balancer facilitates redundancy for the backend layer (web/app servers), but for a true high availability setup, you need to have redundant load balancers as well. So it is well suited for all production related servers and less suited for individual servers that do not require redundancy.
Sure. It does load balancing fantastically. I mean, it's an industry standard product for that. We also use it for TLS offload for applications. Those are the two main use cases for that. We do also use some of the I rules for traffic filtering. We've used that in some of the external facing services. It does a really nice job with that. It's a little bit complicated sometimes and some of the Cipher Suite stuff is interesting.
Some of the stuff you have to dive into the CLI to really use, I'm going to reach back to the previous employer for this. So I had a much greater degree of involvement with it at that point in time for, I was the crypto guy at the company and I had to design all the cipher suites that we actually implemented on our front end banking products. So in order to do that, I had to dive into it, download all the Cipher suites, figure out the actual order of operation for them, how they were selected because I wanted to design the Cipher Suites to actually provide a specific customer experience for the types of connections that our customers were likely to initiate. Getting at that information was a giant PITA. It was poorly documented at the time. I'm not sure if it's documented any better now. Every time the software changed or got upgraded, made your version, I'd have to do it all over again because the upgrades to the stack, which looked like it was based on open SSL, but it was heavily modified with a different syntax. Oh yay. That's fun too. So I had to write giant documents describing all of the ciphers that I was designing for this because it just kept changing all the time. So I didn't care for that aspect of it. Traffic management does a great job for that.
My understanding is a lack of support for UDP traffic
One mistake in the haproxy.cfg prevents the entire thing from starting rather than only affecting the part of the config file that may have a typo of some other syntax problem.
F5 has always been one of the best products we have in the data center. We had few issues with the BUG and Code upgrades but the main use cases for F5 was always top notch. From High availability to Globally load balancing applications across multiple data centers and muti cloud environments.
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is a very good product. It is used in our company widely. So far we are very happy with the product. Esspecially on the load balancing and TLS encryption and Traffic redirecting based on HTTP path and http query. iRules is very easy to use as well.
It is very easy to use. I was able to find a lot of documents for it on the internet. Very good community support. There are lots of examples available to try. We mostly use a command-line user interface to interact with it. The CLI is also super easy to use and very easy to interact with
We haven't used customer support. We mostly used the community version. We build a multi-node HAProxy cluster with HA to the proxy itself using opensource plugins available. With the support available on the internet and the documents available we don't need to use much customer support.
Obviously NetScaler, because we had that functionality, we just turned it on. We were only using it for our Citrix farms and we migrated all of our F5 uses over to the NetScalers. So simply because that was, other than buying the product, which the actual NetScaler themselves were cheap. I mean it cost us like $60,000 for all of them for the hardware. We were already licensed for it, so it was a no-brainer. We didn't have a choice. Definitely a superior product. A lot more functionality, particularly in corner cases where you might need to make some specific traffic tweaks. I would say that the NetScaler doesn't do nearly as good a job with that traffic filtering. You only really get URI filtering with NetScaler. You don't have the flexibility, the eye rolls or the complexity of the eye rolls, so that's a negative too.
We chose HA Proxy because it is cheaper than a hardware balancer, it is an open-source solution with a large community behind it and with constant updates. It also allows custom scripts according to needs.HA Proxy is a solution used in many internet sites like GitHub, Reddit, Twitter, and Tuenti.
We use these for 600+ applications and we are able to manage all of them remotely and provide security across every application in one single platform.
We are able to provide an amazing customer experience load balancing across multiple nodes and this increases traffic on our websites and ultimately increases orders and traffic.
Significantly lower investment vs competitors. In the case of F5s we have Virtual Editions so we're paying for the hardware to run it on top of the several thousand dollar licenses that are required for each pair and we currently have a pair of F5s per client so there's a huge potential for cost savings there.
Requires our network engineers to learn a new skill or our Systems engineers to take on the responsibility of managing the load balancers. It's not a huge difference either way, but it does impact the way we have done business in the past.
