HAProxy consulting and hands-on support

HAProxy is a high-performance load balancer and proxy that distributes TCP and HTTP traffic across multiple backend servers to improve application availability, responsiveness, and resilience. It is commonly used by DevOps and platform teams to manage ingress for websites, APIs, and internal services, helping prevent overload and reduce the impact of individual node failures.

HAProxy is typically deployed at the edge of an environment on Linux hosts, virtual machines, or containers, and configured with routing rules and health checks to keep traffic flowing to healthy backends. It fits well in both on-prem and cloud architectures where predictable traffic handling and operational visibility are required.

• Layer 4 and Layer 7 load balancing for TCP and HTTP workloads
• Active health checks with automatic failover and backend draining
• TLS termination and flexible routing based on host, path, or headers
• Connection management features such as timeouts, retries, and rate limiting
• Operational visibility via logs and built-in statistics endpoints

• Ensures high availability and reliability by redirecting traffic to healthy servers
• Provides efficient load balancing to optimize resource utilization and application performance
• Supports a wide variety of load balancing algorithms to meet different needs
• Offers SSL/TLS termination, enabling secure communication without burdening application servers
• Capable of handling millions of concurrent connections with minimal CPU and memory usage
• Includes detailed logging and monitoring features for in-depth analysis of traffic patterns and errors
• Supports HTTP/2 and WebSocket, catering to modern web applications
• Allows for flexible and granular configuration to fine-tune server and application behavior
• Integrates well with various back-end technologies and cloud environments
• Active community and extensive documentation support for troubleshooting and optimization
  

Our experience with HAProxy helped us develop repeatable configuration patterns, upgrade/migration playbooks, and operational runbooks that we reuse to help clients balance TCP/HTTP traffic with predictable performance, security, and high availability.

Some of the things we did include:

• Audited existing HAProxy configurations (frontends/backends, ACLs, stick tables, timeouts, retries, health checks) and delivered a prioritized remediation plan focused on availability, latency, and safe failure behavior.
• Designed L4/L7 routing for web and API workloads, including TLS termination, SNI-based routing, header normalization, and controlled redirects/rewrites.
• Built highly available HAProxy pairs and clusters with connection draining, graceful reload strategies, and failover using VRRP/keepalived to minimize maintenance downtime.
• Implemented observability by exporting metrics to Prometheus and building dashboards/alerts in Grafana tied to real failure modes (backend flaps, queue growth, 5xx spikes, TLS handshake errors).
• Hardened edge and internal proxies with modern TLS policies, optional mTLS, strict header handling, and clear separation of public vs. private routing domains.
• Added traffic management controls such as rate limiting, request/connection limits, circuit-breaker style backoff, and abuse protection for public-facing endpoints.
• Enabled progressive delivery patterns (blue/green and canary) using weighted backends, routing rules, and session persistence strategies appropriate for stateful services.
• Automated configuration generation, validation, and promotion with Git-based workflows, CI checks, and staged rollouts across environments.
• Integrated HAProxy with Kubernetes for north-south traffic and hybrid deployments, supporting both static backends and service discovery where appropriate.
• Optimized performance by tuning connection reuse, buffering behavior, timeouts, and kernel/network parameters based on traffic profiles and load-test results.
• Planned and executed migrations from legacy load balancers and ingress stacks to HAProxy with phased cutovers, parallel validation, and tested rollback procedures.

This experience helped us accumulate significant knowledge across HAProxy use-cases—from edge routing to internal service balancing—and enables us to deliver HAProxy setups that are maintainable, observable, and reliable in production.

Some of the things we can help you do with HAProxy include:

• Assess your current HAProxy topology and configuration, then deliver a prioritized report covering availability, performance, security, and operational risk.
• Build an adoption roadmap to standardize load-balancing patterns across teams and environments (dev/stage/prod) with clear rollout milestones.
• Design and implement HAProxy for TCP/HTTP workloads, including L4/L7 routing, health checks, retries, and failover for high availability.
• Harden edge security with TLS termination, modern cipher suites, mTLS where appropriate, ACLs, rate limiting, and compliance-aligned guardrails.
• Optimize performance and cost by tuning timeouts, connection handling, keep-alives, buffering, and backend pool sizing to reduce latency and waste.
• Automate configuration and releases using Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD with versioned configs, validation, and safe promotion workflows.
• Improve observability with structured logs, metrics, and actionable alerting for saturation, error rates, and backend health in your existing monitoring stack.
• Troubleshoot production issues such as intermittent 4xx/5xx, timeouts, uneven load distribution, and TLS negotiation failures with clear remediation steps.
• Define operational runbooks for incident response, scaling, maintenance windows, and disaster recovery to keep traffic flowing during change and failure.
• Enable your team with hands-on workshops and documentation so engineers can confidently operate, tune, and extend HAProxy over time.

Learn more about HAProxy at haproxy.org.