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Comment by rogerdonut | Hacker News Reader

Author of the blog post here, happy to answer any questions about this release.

Not specific to this release, but for an system architect that is taking the first look ever to the product:

- the site does not do a good job of describing the products and what they do. https://www.haproxy.com/products/haproxy-enterprise-edition/ has a download button as the start and tells nothing about the product.

- it is hard to find requirements from the first page. (https://www.haproxy.com/documentation/hapee/2-2r1/getting-st...)

- is there any a page with basic architecture of the product? Some diagrams with typical configurations.

- is there a simpler HA setup than the 3 layer one here: https://www.haproxy.com/documentation/hapee/2-2r1/high-avail... ? What is the simplest HA configuration for 2 web servers?

Thanks for the feedback. I've provided a few replies below but I think you have made some great points and I will share them internally.

> - the site does not do a good job of describing the products and what they do.

The page does lead off by telling you it is a software load balancer, but I agree, we can do a better job of giving more information on the product itself. Most people who pursue HAProxy Enterprise are already familiar with HAProxy. With that said, we're actually working on a complete overhaul to this page and I believe the new version will address this.

> - it is hard to find requirements from the first page.

This is just a reference point and typically organizations are working closely with a sales engineer.

> - is there a simpler HA setup than the 3 layer one here:

A simpler version is found under active/standby here [1]

[1] https://www.haproxy.com/documentation/hapee/2-2r1/high-avail...

Thank you. Just for info, my personal experience working for a very big American company is that every time I call a product company for information, I get intensely called back months in a row even if the product does not meet our needs, so I prefer not to do that anymore and to dig myself for info until I figure if that is looking very promising. Maybe it is not the same in your case, but who acts assuming it's an exception?

How did you get a system architect title while somehow never looking at haproxy in the last.... 15 years?!

Downvote me all you want but “architects” need to look at the solution landscape at least once in 15 years.

Plenty areas of software where HAProxy is not part of the relevant "solution landscape".

Systems architect?! I want a load balancer. What’s your top 5 excluding HAProxy?

You don't need 5, especially when the load balancing is part of the network or infrastructure team that are a different group. Some companies have hardware load balancers, some use products like VMWare NSX or both, depending on the needs. When you are a Windows shop, HAProxy is not on the short list, hearing about it and actually knowing it are 2 different sides of the coin.

As someone who isn’t familiar with this space - is the use of HAProxy as a self hosted DDOS defense a “supported” (prioritized?) use case? I found old blog posts on this application of HAProxy but wasn’t sure if new development tries to improve those capabilities or if it is more focused on load balancing or other applications.

Open tracing sounds nice, what info is passed along?

My question is what conversation has there been re: Opentelemetry, the successor to OT

It sounds like ot is still in beta (but it's a little confusing that they're 1.0 but it has a message saying they're in beta on their main page).

It looks like it's being adopted by a few larger app monitoring products, wondering if datadog will follow suit or if they will stick with open tracing and their custom implementations for logging and metrics. I assume they will support ingestion from ot at some point though. It sounds neat tho, will definitely read up on it more.

You can pass along timing data from every aspect of the request [1] currently there are approximately 20 events supported. You can also send over just about anything that can be stored within an HAProxy variable / header through a tag. Here's an example configuration for HAProxy (simple) [2] (advanced) [3] and the OpenTracing specific configuration (simple) [4] (advanced) [5]. I've included both simple and advanced configurations.

[1] https://github.com/haproxy/haproxy/blob/master/addons/ot/REA...

[2] https://github.com/haproxy/haproxy/blob/master/addons/ot/tes...

[3] https://github.com/haproxy/haproxy/blob/master/addons/ot/tes...

[4] https://github.com/haproxy/haproxy/blob/master/addons/ot/tes...

[5] https://github.com/haproxy/haproxy/blob/master/addons/ot/tes...

Yea, it's pretty flexible and you can attach any additional metadata that you want (e.g. app version info, user name).

The added support for FIX is interesting. As far as I can tell it's just TCP-level load balancing, is that right? HAProxy doesn't have the ability to, say, distribute each incoming order to a different backend server?

It has the ability to route by FIX tags. You can find an example here [1]

[1] https://www.haproxy.com/blog/haproxy-enterprise-2-3-and-hapr...

Sure, I saw that example. Maybe let me put it a different way: if a client has one inbound FIX connection to HAProxy, can HAProxy connect to N backend servers and send each FIX message from the single client connection to a different backend?

I have not tested that use case but I do not think so. It has the ability to parse FIX tag values and make routing decisions from the initial Logon message.

It seems like it could:

  use_backend fix_servers_a if { var(txn.sendercompid) -m str firmA }
    default_backend fix_servers_b

Then "fix_servers_a" could be defined as a round-robin backend.

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