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.
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Radware Alteon
Score 6.9 out of 10
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Radware Alteon, from Israeli company Radware, is an application delivery controller.
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.
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.
The software web application is beyond terrible, in most of the cases the web was broken or did not have similar functionality the command line interface had.
The command line interface wasn't a natural looking interface, it was very fumbled and while it ran on Linux, the interface was all menus and sub-menus.
When enabling different pools for different web services, when a new pool was activated, the old pool connections were all reset instead of allowing HTTP sessions to naturally expire.
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.
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 moved away from Alteon to F5 BigIP LTM and just by swapping out the hardware, we saw 40% speed increase in our applications. Everything else is much improved as well, from the web interface to the command line to the API.
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.
