Unifying HAProxy’s enterprise application delivery platform for next-level scale and innovation
This is a big one. HAProxy Fusion Control Plane is here to give our customers the power to simplify, scale, and secure their HAProxy application delivery infrastructure using a centralized control plane. HAProxy Fusion enables your business to scale up, launch new products faster, and improve security and resilience.
We couldn’t be more excited to introduce our long-awaited centralized control plane and embark on a new journey with our customers – realizing our vision of a unified enterprise application delivery platform that enables the scale and innovation needed to power the next wave of enterprise applications.
Today we pull back the curtain to give you insight into the vision and development process behind HAProxy Fusion: where we have come from, where we are going, and why this is good for HAProxy customers.
Why Did We Create HAProxy Fusion?
Fast. Reliable. Flexible. This is HAProxy, in three words – direct from our customers. HAProxy Technologies was recently ranked a Leader in multiple categories by G2 on the back of excellent user reviews and a growing market presence with over 1,500 enterprise customers. Being a detail-obsessed company, we naturally read every single review. And three words came up again and again.
Fast. Reliable. Flexible.
That’s fantastic! But with our team always wanting to go beyond expectations to delight customers, we wanted to do more. More for our enterprise customers who are building bigger and more demanding application deployments than ever. And more for the HAProxy team – because challenging ourselves to continue to lead the next decade of app delivery is one heck of a reason to wake up in the morning.
When you’re starting from a position of being fast, reliable, and flexible, what does “more” look like?
For our customers dealing with the complexities of modern app delivery, “more” is less. Fewer tools, fewer integration points, and intuitive control. Make it simple.
For our customers building high-scale deployments with multiple locations, cloud environments, and teams and pushing the boundaries of performance, “more” is the ability to handle bigger deployments. Scalable architectures, automated deployment and configuration, and unified observability. Make it scale.
For our customers desperately trying to maintain the security of complex, large-scale networks, “more” means a stronger, safer platform. Global WAF policy, ML/AI powered traffic profiling and bot management, auto-validating and self-healing config, and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). Make it secure.
So we have three new words to live by at HAProxy. Three new words we want to be known for. Simple. Scalable. Secure.
The Road To Centralized Control
This has been on our hearts for a while. Way back at HAProxyConf 2019, we teased our audience with a vision for natively centralized orchestration of HAProxy deployments. Since then, we have released the Data Plane API for our community and enterprise users, providing simple and consistent remote control of single HAProxy instances. This immediately unlocked integration between HAProxy and popular automation tools, but it was also a key milestone on the path to building our own fully orchestrated solution.
Andjelko Iharos, Director of Engineering, presenting HAProxy Fusion at HAProxyConf 2022
In November 2022, we formally launched the HAProxy Fusion Control Plane at HAProxyConf in Paris to an in-person audience of hundreds of community members, with live-stream viewers joining in as well. Our Director of Engineering, Andjelko Iharos, has led the development of HAProxy Fusion – and his passion and experience shined through in his keynote presentation. We provided live demos of HAProxy Fusion in the conference center for the eager crowd to get hands-on.
Today, v1.0 of HAProxy Fusion is available for customers as an upgrade to HAProxy Enterprise. It connects a high-performance, centralized control plane with the remote control capabilities of the Data Plane API. Right now, this lets you manage and monitor all your HAProxy Enterprise instances from a single UI or API, whether on-premises or in the cloud. In the upcoming releases, we will work to extend HAProxy Fusion to cover all HAProxy products.
This will provide end-to-end application delivery, simpler architectures, and the security and observability features needed to scale large enterprise applications.
A More End-To-End Application Delivery Platform That Releases Innovation
Take a look at our product portfolio today. HAProxy Technologies provides a range of products to meet different use cases.
HAProxy Community is the world’s fastest and most widely used software load balancer. It is free and open source.
HAProxy Enterprise builds on HAProxy Community with advanced security, third-party integrations, and enterprise support.
HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller provides internal and external load balancing, HTTP traffic routing, and security for Kubernetes clusters.
HAProxy ALOHA is a hardware or virtual ADC appliance built on HAProxy Enterprise and featuring our PacketShield DDoS protection, a simple UI, routing components, and an OS.
HAProxy Edge is a fully managed and turnkey application delivery network (ADN) and content delivery network (CDN) enhanced by machine learning, dynamic autoscaling, and intelligent security and DDoS protection.
(If you want to learn more about these products, check out our product portfolio page.)
These products provide a spectrum of deployment models and user experiences: from open and infinitely customizable on one end to fully managed Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on the other.
They support a spectrum of architectures and layers in your network infrastructure: from on-premises to cloud, from origin to edge, and from static networks to dynamic, autoscaling environments.
They serve the needs of a spectrum of operators and stakeholders: from developers to DevOps to traditional IT Operations.
But they all have one thing in common. Every HAProxy product is a discrete unit managed individually. Until now. HAProxy Fusion represents the unification of our portfolio of discrete products into a complete end-to-end enterprise application delivery platform capable of adapting as organizations scale and transform.
This is important because our survey data (from HAProxyConf 2022) shows the majority of our users run mixed architectures (monolithic and microservices) and are split roughly 50/50 on whether to deploy in a public cloud or on-premises and whether to use a CDN. “End-to-end” looks different for every customer and is a constantly shifting picture. To ensure our platform meets the needs of our diverse customers today and tomorrow, we aim to support as many architectures and configurations as possible.
Beyond flexibility, we also want our customers to be able to implement the configurations they want as quickly and easily as possible. With this in mind, we will prioritize and provide optimized workflows for the common use cases and emerging trends that we think will benefit our customers the most. As the first step, our launch integration between HAProxy Fusion and our popular HAProxy Enterprise load balancer provides simplified access to HAProxy Enterprise’s advanced features and native automation of deployment and configuration.
Our focus on simplicity extends to the underlying infrastructure. HAProxy Fusion integrates with cloud and container infrastructure providers, enabling our centralized control plane to manage dynamic deployments, including creating and destroying load balancers on-demand, autoscaling up and down, and self-healing. This removes the need to deploy individual instances. At launch, HAProxy Fusion integrates with AWS; in upcoming releases, we will work to add integrations with other popular infrastructure platforms.
HAProxy Technologies has a unique advantage in developing an end-to-end application delivery platform. All the products that make up our platform (including HAProxy Edge ADN/CDN) are powered by first-party HAProxy technology – including load balancing algorithms, caching, and DDoS protection. This passes on two powerful benefits to our customers:
We can integrate and optimize the HAProxy platform internals without being constrained by third-party code outside our control. This means that our customers get the fastest and most reliable end-to-end experience.
We can provide authoritative support on the whole HAProxy application delivery platform, with complete insight into the development and operation of every product. This means we can solve problems in the load balancing stack with precision and confidence.
Just as the Sun’s nuclear fusion transforms atomic elements into something new and releases energy exponentially, we expect the fusion of HAProxy’s individually powerful products (and the fusion of all their locations, data, and workflows) to create a platform that is more than the sum of its parts – one that releases rapid innovation among our customers and the wider community. We can’t wait to see what they present when they take to the main stage at future HAProxyConf events!
As we continue to connect each product with HAProxy Fusion’s centralized control plane, our customers will experience growing efficiencies in management, scaling, migration, troubleshooting, and more. Those using HAProxy Fusion integrated with HAProxy Enterprise/ALOHA and HAProxy Edge will benefit from a single interface and workflow for deploying application services from origin to edge without having to define their application in multiple locations.
This also positions HAProxy Technologies to be the single provider of application delivery control functions for large enterprises with diverse architectures and applications, adding even more value and efficiency to these most demanding scenarios.
A More Unified Platform That Enables A Simpler Architecture
With HAProxy Fusion, our customers can simplify their application delivery architectures.
Previously, customers deploying HAProxy at scale had to think in terms of hundreds or thousands of individual load balancers and WAFs. Where and when should they run? Who can access them? How to configure them all? Where do their logs and metrics go? How to automate them centrally?
And if the deployment includes different HAProxy products, those questions multiply to account for the differences.
Now, using HAProxy Fusion to unify HAProxy Technologies’ products into a complete application delivery platform, solution architects can take a breath and relax (well, maybe a little bit).
We can start thinking about a single platform for load balancing, WAF, bot management, DDoS protection, SSL, application acceleration, ADN/CDN, and more. It will extend deep into a customer’s own network and out to HAProxy’s own hosted Edge. This platform will simplify management, observability, and automation through one unified interface.
When considering management, provisioning, and configuration, you only need to interact with one UI or API.
When considering observability, and integration with external data endpoints and monitoring tools, you only need to export data from one source.
When considering how to automate application delivery to be responsive to new applications, new servers and services, new threats, and real-time traffic patterns, you only need to pass instructions to one control plane.
The time required for managing, monitoring, and automating HAProxy deployments at scale is significantly reduced with HAProxy Fusion. For the 83% of HAProxy users who already automate HAProxy configuration using the Data Plane API or a third-party tool such as Ansible or Puppet, HAProxy Fusion will be transformational.
HAProxy Fusion dramatically ups the efficiency of running apps and websites at scale and simplifies your overall architecture, making HAProxy Fusion one of the most important components in your infrastructure.
A More Enterprise-Friendly Platform To Power Next-Level Scale
Every day, our customers challenge us to be better. Our application delivery solutions must stretch to meet a wider range of use cases at scales not seen until the last couple of years.
Performance is non-negotiable at this scale, and HAProxy absolutely delivers on this front. In 2021, Willy Tarreau (the original creator and lead developer of the HAProxy project) showed how a single HAProxy instance could handle 2 million requests per second (RPS) with “TLS for free”. This level of performance is necessary but by itself is not sufficient to power the next wave of enterprise applications.
Our recent survey at HAProxyConf 2022 showed that our biggest users – those handling over 100,000 requests per second – share many related concerns.
They all run multi-location application deployments.
They all run ten or more load-balancing clusters.
Four out of five are concerned about the risk of DDoS attacks.
Nine out of ten have teams of more than five people using HAProxy products.
More than half need multi-team access to HAProxy products.
This shows that handling enterprise scale is about more than just performance. Enterprise customers need a solution that:
simplifies management of geographically distributed infrastructure and multiple clusters;
provides global protection against DDoS and other malicious behavior, such as request flooding, brute forcing, and more;
controls compliance and access for multiple team members in different roles – accelerating delivery and reducing risk.
HAProxy Fusion does all this and more, converting the fusion of HAProxy products into a true enterprise application delivery platform for users to deploy the next generation of highly scalable applications.
The power to control HAProxy Technologies’ diverse product range with a unified UI or API also makes HAProxy Fusion an ideal platform for enabling digital transformation in large enterprises.
The process of adopting new technologies and migrating existing apps and services is typically risky as the essential infrastructure for maintaining performance, reliability, and security often fails to adapt. HAProxy Fusion will make it simpler for you to migrate to new architectures, locations, and form factors, knowing that your app delivery infrastructure will adapt and provide continuity.
Three Key Features, One Amazing Future
Simple, scalable, and secure. That’s the future of HAProxy Technologies, and it will make a big difference to our users – especially those operating at the largest scale.
HAProxy Fusion is only possible thanks to the success of the HAProxy load balancer. Without our open-source community’s contributions and long-standing enthusiasm, HAProxy would not be the fast, reliable, and flexible market leader it is today.
So, thank you – to our community of developers for helping build the foundations of a world-leading product. And thank you – to our enterprise customers for stretching us to build the next big thing.
Users of HAProxy Enterprise can ask their account manager for a trial of HAProxy Fusion today. If you’re not yet using HAProxy Enterprise, ask us for a demo and a trial of HAProxy Fusion together with HAProxy Enterprise to see what you can accomplish.
HAProxy Fusion has landed. Let’s get started!
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