Introduction to HAProxy
Every application has the same unglamorous requirement: stay up. Traffic doesn't arrive politely, and servers don't fail on schedule. A single server can't absorb that reality. A load balancer can, and the most widely used software load balancer is HAProxy.
HAProxy sits between your users and your servers. It spreads requests across healthy backends, detects the ones that stop responding, and routes around them before anyone notices. It terminates TLS, enforces routing rules, and exposes detailed stats on every connection it handles. All of it runs from a single binary and one readable config file.
In this session, you'll learn:
The problems load balancing solves, from failed servers to zero-downtime deploys
How a request travels through HAProxy, from client connection to backend response
The four sections of a basic haproxy.cfg (global, defaults, frontend, backend) and what each one controls
How HAProxy decides where each request goes, and why the default choice isn't always the right one
Where HAProxy fits in a modern stack, whether you run bare metal, VMs, containers, or Kubernetes
Speakers
