HAProxy

Over the past year, we've shifted our philosophy on managed services and have moved several critical parts of our infrastructure away from self-managed options. The most prominent was our shift away from HAProxy to AWS's managed application load balancers (ALBs).

As we scaled, managing our HAProxy fleet became a larger and larger burden. We spent a significant amount of time tuning our configuration files and benchmarking different Amazon EC2 instance types to maximize throughput.

Emerging needs like #DDoS protection and auto scaling turned into large projects that we needed to schedule urgently. Instead of continuing this investment, we chose to shift to managed ALB instances. This was a large project, but it quickly paid for itself as we've nearly eliminated the time spent managing load balancers. We also gained DDoS protection and auto scaling "for free".

We've switched our static pages from NGINX to HAProxy. Using stick tables, traffic rules and ACLs allowed us to have better control over our traffic while load balancing. Also, performance gain with latency, threads, and processes.

When accepting events, we would be crazy to just expose the Python web process to the public Internet and say, “Alright, give me all you got!” Instead, we use two different proxying services that sit in front of our web machines:

1. NGINX, our product-aware proxy, handles many of the upper bounds that we have deemed reasonable. It is responsible for a variety of bounds, but its most popular one is protecting Sentry from exceedingly large event volumes. Ever so often, a user will run into a problem where they’ve deployed their code out into the abyss, and their event volume clocks in at a few zeroes higher than what they signed up for.

2. In front of NGINX, we use another proxying service called HAProxy, which acts as a delta of connections without any of that product awareness logic and has a lot higher throughput. All it does is accept connections and send them off to different NGINX servers, allowing us to gracefully add or remove NGINX servers as we see fit.

#WebServers #LoadBalancerReverseProxy

I use HAproxy primarily for application routing and SSL termination. I also use its logs and statistics to visualize incoming traffic in Kibana. HAProxy

We use HAProxy to load balance between our webservers. It balances TCP between the machines round robin and leaves everything else to Node.js, leaving the connections open with a reasonably long time to live to support WebSockets and re-use of a TCP connection for AJAX polling. HAProxy