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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Infrastructure as a Service
  4. Load Balancer Reverse Proxy
  5. HAProxy vs Katran

HAProxy vs Katran

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

HAProxy
HAProxy
Stacks2.6K
Followers2.1K
Votes564
Katran
Katran
Stacks3
Followers20
Votes0

HAProxy vs Katran: What are the differences?

## Key Differences between HAProxy and Katran

HAProxy and Katran are both widely used tools for load balancing, but they differ in some key aspects. 

1. **Protocol Support**: HAProxy supports a wide range of protocols including HTTP, TCP, and SSL, making it a versatile choice for various use cases. On the other hand, Katran focuses primarily on supporting only the TCP protocol, which may limit its applicability in certain scenarios.

2. **Performance**: HAProxy is known for its high performance and efficiency in handling a large number of concurrent connections. Katran, while also efficient, may not match the same level of performance as HAProxy in certain high-load scenarios. 

3. **Customization**: HAProxy offers a high degree of customization and configuration options, allowing users to tailor the load balancing behavior to specific requirements. Katran, being more specialized in its focus, may offer less room for customization compared to HAProxy.

4. **Community Support**: HAProxy has a large and active community of users and developers, providing extensive documentation, support, and third-party integrations. Katran, as a relatively newer tool, may have a smaller community and fewer resources available for troubleshooting and support.

5. **Ease of Use**: HAProxy has a reputation for being user-friendly with a straightforward configuration process, making it accessible to users of varying levels of expertise. Katran, due to its more specialized nature, may require a deeper understanding of networking principles and load balancing concepts to effectively configure and use.

6. **Scalability**: HAProxy has a proven track record of scalability, with the ability to handle large and complex deployments with ease. While Katran is designed for high-performance scenarios, its scalability in extremely large and complex environments may not be as extensively tested and proven as HAProxy.

In Summary, HAProxy and Katran differ in protocol support, performance, customization options, community support, ease of use, and scalability, catering to different use cases and preferences in load balancing solutions.

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Detailed Comparison

HAProxy
HAProxy
Katran
Katran

HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications.

katran is a cpp library and bpf program to build high performance layer 4 load balancing forwarding plane. katran leverages XDP infrastructure from the kernel to provide in-kernel facility for fast packet's processing.

-
blazing fast (especially w/ XDP in driver mode); performance scaling linearly with a number of NIC's RX queues; RSS friendly encapsulation
Statistics
Stacks
2.6K
Stacks
3
Followers
2.1K
Followers
20
Votes
564
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 134
    Load balancer
  • 102
    High performance
  • 69
    Very fast
  • 58
    Proxying for tcp and http
  • 55
    SSL termination
Cons
  • 6
    Becomes your single point of failure
No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to HAProxy, Katran?

Traefik

Traefik

A modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components and configures itself automatically and dynamically.

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

With Elastic Load Balancing, you can add and remove EC2 instances as your needs change without disrupting the overall flow of information. If one EC2 instance fails, Elastic Load Balancing automatically reroutes the traffic to the remaining running EC2 instances. If the failed EC2 instance is restored, Elastic Load Balancing restores the traffic to that instance. Elastic Load Balancing offers clients a single point of contact, and it can also serve as the first line of defense against attacks on your network. You can offload the work of encryption and decryption to Elastic Load Balancing, so your servers can focus on their main task.

Fly

Fly

Deploy apps through our global load balancer with minimal shenanigans. All Fly-enabled applications get free SSL certificates, accept traffic through our global network of datacenters, and encrypt all traffic from visitors through to application servers.

Envoy

Envoy

Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures.

Hipache

Hipache

Hipache is a distributed proxy designed to route high volumes of http and websocket traffic to unusually large numbers of virtual hosts, in a highly dynamic topology where backends are added and removed several times per second. It is particularly well-suited for PaaS (platform-as-a-service) and other environments that are both business-critical and multi-tenant.

node-http-proxy

node-http-proxy

node-http-proxy is an HTTP programmable proxying library that supports websockets. It is suitable for implementing components such as proxies and load balancers.

Modern DDoS Protection & Edge Security Platform

Modern DDoS Protection & Edge Security Platform

Protect and accelerate your apps with Trafficmind’s global edge — DDoS defense, WAF, API security, CDN/DNS, 99.99% uptime and 24/7 expert team.

DigitalOcean Load Balancer

DigitalOcean Load Balancer

Load Balancers are a highly available, fully-managed service that work right out of the box and can be deployed as fast as a Droplet. Load Balancers distribute incoming traffic across your infrastructure to increase your application's availability.

F5 BIG-IP

F5 BIG-IP

It ensures that applications are always secure and perform the way they should. You get built-in security, traffic management, and performance application services, whether your applications live in a private data center or in the cloud.

Google Cloud Load Balancing

Google Cloud Load Balancing

You can scale your applications on Google Compute Engine from zero to full-throttle with it, with no pre-warming needed. You can distribute your load-balanced compute resources in single or multiple regions, close to your users and to meet your high availability requirements.

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