The popularity of open source software continues to soar alongside growth in cloud usage, including multi-cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructure. Pluralsight's State of Cloud 2023 report revealed that 65% of organizations actively leverage multi-cloud environments.
Open source software is prized, in part, because it enables freedom of choice in an organization’s tech stack, especially in complex deployment environments. The need for choice extends to load balancers, which are indispensable infrastructure components, powering rapid, reliable, and secure application delivery.
Load balancing software handles a wide range of functions and interacts with many other components. Flexibility at the load-balancing level, as provided by open source software, helps maximize freedom of choice across your entire application infrastructure.
Application delivery is best supported by scalable, distributed systems. As client requests arrive—for instance, to display a product page to a user—the load balancer distributes the requests to backend servers according to specified load-balancing algorithms. This prevents servers from becoming overloaded, boosting overall capacity and helping applications scale in a cost-efficient manner.
That was all traditional load balancers did, but modern load balancers have evolved into robust application delivery solutions, with additional features such as:
Advanced request routing
Failover protection and health checking, which help to ensure high availability
Security capabilities, including next-generation web application firewall (WAF) capability and bot management
Centralized management, monitoring and automation, resulting in greater operational efficiency
Organizations need a feature-rich load balancer that integrates seamlessly everywhere—elevating load balancers beyond simple tools to flexible, all-in-one workhorses for modern application environments.
Here are key characteristics that distinguish a modern load balancer capable of maximizing freedom in your tech stack:
Open source foundations
Product development rooted in community involvement and open source contributions is powerful. While many solutions are black boxes, providing few hints as to how they're built or function, a transparent and customizable open source solution built upon feedback will serve users best. This approach is more responsive to user needs and bolstered by peer review. Look for healthy and robust open source projects with a demonstrated history of community code contributions.
Widespread popularity over time
Widespread popularity indicates a vendor is supportive of customer needs over the long term, which enables customers to build and innovate from a position of trust. We see this happen in a couple of ways.
First, a widely used and enduring project matures and improves quickly and consistently, having been exposed to a plethora of challenges and changing technologies.
Second, a popular product will typically have a large and active community that can help answer questions, provide how-to guides on niche implementations, and build integrations with other tools and platforms.
Broad technology support
To maximize freedom, a load balancing platform must be maximally flexible. This includes supporting TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) at Layer 4 and HTTP at Layer 7 of the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) stack. Some load balancers excel in this area while others have stagnated.
Broad technology support also unlocks numerous use case possibilities within trending and emerging areas, such as DevOps, AI gateways, and Kubernetes (to name a few).
Comprehensive support for environments and deployment models
An infrastructure-agnostic load balancer can ease decision-making pressure while providing flexibility and consistency. For example, you need to be able to run workloads across AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and more.
A capable load balancing platform must also offer specific support for private clouds, hybrid clouds, on-premises environments, and the edge. Having flexible deployment options—including virtual machines, containers, and even appliances—is key.
You need a load balancer that doesn't lock you into a particular environment. You need support for any cloud provider, VM or container, or on-premises deployment, without technical compromises. This future-proofs your tech stack, enabling more seamless modernization minus undue friction or expense.
Cost optimization
Cost is the hardest hurdle to clear while innovating, as the vast majority of organizations have budgetary constraints. Load balancing vendors that offer a popular and widely used open source pathway provide one answer. Robust enterprise options with pricing transparency, simple cost structures, and straightforward sales practices complete the picture. The interaction between open source and paid products and their user communities can benefit everyone.
Overall performance per dollar is also key. A performant load balancer optimizes resource usage on backend servers and requires less hardware to run a given workload, helping your software scale out effectively and reduce total cost of ownership.
Achieve ultimate freedom with HAProxy
HAProxy is the best load balancer for organizations needing the utmost freedom from their tech stack. Our open source community has powered 23 years of feature development, helping HAProxy remain responsive to user needs and at the cutting edge of technology adoption. We welcome code contributions and encourage feedback from all users.
HAProxy's open source core, enterprise suite, and exceptional customer experience have helped build widespread popularity and trust, from enthusiasts and SMBs to the world’s leading companies and cloud providers. As a result, the HAProxy Docker Official Image has been downloaded more than one billion times!
With broad support for more than 15 protocols, HAProxy provides a platform for a wide range of traditional and modern applications—from websites and log servers to IoT devices and online video games. HAProxy is infrastructure-agnostic, so you can deploy it anywhere and in a range of form factors to suit your needs.
Simple pricing and efficient performance make it easy for high-volume users to optimize costs even as they scale out their applications and infrastructure, which helps customers to grow and be successful. Performance benchmarks and testing by our most demanding users show that HAProxy’s performance advantage is significant and provides tangible benefits.
If you prioritize freedom in your tech stack, to maximize your options today and in the future, then HAProxy is a proven and trusted solution for organizations of all sizes and levels of complexity. If you’d like to learn more, contact our team to start a conversation.
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