The HAProxy Open Source Ecosystem

By improving interoperability and extensibility, we open doors for new community engagement, Andjelko Iharos, Director of Engineering at HAProxy Technologies, explained in relation to several HAProxy open-source projects during his HAProxyConf 2021 keynote. The synergistic benefits we get from having a friendly, interactive, and helpful community of skilled users and developers can’t be overstated.

Two prominent open-source projects, the HAProxy Data Plane API and the HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller were developed over the past few years and provide more ways to integrate and interact with HAProxy.

One upcoming Data Plane API feature is the addition of an API endpoint that returns structured data. This will enable users to reconfigure all of the resources that the API manages using either a YAML or JSON format, providing conversion to and from the HAProxy configuration format.

Similarly, the Kubernetes Ingress Controller also recently gained a feature that improves interoperability. Its Custom Resource Definitions (CRD) offer a more robust and forward-looking alternative compared to Kubernetes object annotations. CRD objects support changes to the global, defaults, and backend sections of the ingress controller’s configuration. 

Andjelko pointed to another example of collaboration with our community, the integration with HashiCorp’s Consul that was developed jointly with marketing technology company Criteo. The integration project harnesses the benefits of the HAProxy client-native library and Data Plane API to enable users to scale out and maintain the configuration of hundreds of HAProxy instances.

Each technological step forward can be linked to community feedback and contributed work, ultimately expanding HAProxy’s impact and broadening the ways in which it can thrive. This is why we will continue to build and expand HAProxy’s versatility, integration capabilities, and ease of use: So that we can continue to grow together with our community.

Slide Deck

Here you can view the slides used in this presentation if you’d like a quick overview of what was shown during the talk.

Andjelko Iharos Director of Engineering, HAProxy Technologies

Andjelko is a Director of Engineering at HAProxy Technologies. He is responsible for designing and overseeing implementation of solutions and services at all scales, from low level and microsecond optimized software to massive automated clusters processing tens of billions of requests per day. Andjelko works with tools such as Python, C, Golang and many more.