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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Infrastructure as a Service
  4. Load Balancer Reverse Proxy
  5. AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Fly vs HAProxy

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Fly vs HAProxy

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

HAProxy
HAProxy
Stacks2.6K
Followers2.1K
Votes564
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
Stacks12.8K
Followers8.8K
Votes59
Fly
Fly
Stacks89
Followers47
Votes14

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Fly vs HAProxy: What are the differences?

  1. Scalability: AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) offers scalable load balancing capabilities by automatically distributing incoming application traffic across multiple targets such as Amazon EC2 instances. In contrast, Fly uses a global network of servers for load balancing, allowing for high scalability and efficient traffic distribution. HAProxy is a software-based load balancer that can be scaled horizontally by adding more instances or vertically by upgrading hardware resources.

  2. Cost: ELB pricing in AWS is usage-based and can vary depending on the amount of data processed and the type of resources used. Fly offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model that charges based on the number of requests served and the network egress traffic. HAProxy is an open-source solution, saving costs on licensing fees, but it requires more resources to manage and maintain in comparison to managed load balancers like ELB and Fly.

  3. Features: ELB provides features like SSL termination, health checks, access logs, and content-based routing for managing traffic efficiently. Fly offers advanced features like global load balancing, automatic failover, multi-cloud support, and edge computing capabilities. HAProxy, being a software-based solution, provides flexibility in configuration and customization, allowing users to fine-tune load balancing behavior based on specific requirements.

  4. Integration: ELB seamlessly integrates with other AWS services like Auto Scaling, Route 53, and CloudWatch for automated scaling and monitoring. Fly can be integrated with various cloud providers, CDNs, and deployment tools through APIs and plugins, enabling a flexible and interoperable infrastructure. HAProxy can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud and easily integrates with container orchestration platforms like Docker and Kubernetes for modern application deployments.

  5. Performance: ELB is a managed service that offers high availability and low latency through intelligent traffic routing and load balancing algorithms. Fly uses anycast routing to optimize performance by directing traffic to the nearest server location, reducing latency and improving response times. HAProxy is known for its high performance and low overhead, capable of handling millions of connections per second with minimal impact on server resources.

  6. Security: ELB provides built-in DDoS protection, SSL termination, and encryption for securing traffic between clients and servers. Fly ensures security through TLS encryption, access control lists, and firewall rules to protect against malicious attacks and data breaches. HAProxy offers security features like SSL offloading, client IP address preservation, and rate limiting to safeguard applications from potential threats and vulnerabilities.

In Summary, AWS Elastic Load Balancing, Fly, and HAProxy differ in terms of scalability, cost, features, integration, performance, and security, providing unique solutions for load balancing requirements in various environments.

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Detailed Comparison

HAProxy
HAProxy
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
Fly
Fly

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.

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.

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.

-
Distribution of requests to Amazon EC2 instances (servers) in multiple Availability Zones so that the risk of overloading one single instance is minimized. And if an entire Availability Zone goes offline, Elastic Load Balancing routes traffic to instances in other Availability Zones.;Continuous monitoring of the health of Amazon EC2 instances registered with the load balancer so that requests are sent only to the healthy instances. If an instance becomes unhealthy, Elastic Load Balancing stops sending traffic to that instance and spreads the load across the remaining healthy instances.;Support for end-to-end traffic encryption on those networks that use secure (HTTPS/SSL) connections.;The ability to take over the encryption and decryption work from the Amazon EC2 instances, and manage it centrally on the load balancer.;Support for the sticky session feature, which is the ability to "stick" user sessions to specific Amazon EC2 instances.;Association of the load balancer with your domain name. Because the load balancer is the only computer that is exposed to the Internet, you don’t have to create and manage public domain names for the instances that the load balancer manages. You can point the instance's domain records at the load balancer instead and scale as needed (either adding or removing capacity) without having to update the records with each scaling activity.;When used in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), support for creation and management of security groups associated with your load balancer to provide additional networking and security options.;Supports use of both the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).
Purpose-built cloud; CPU, memory, and storage on tap; Batteries Included Networking; Metrics and alerting
Statistics
Stacks
2.6K
Stacks
12.8K
Stacks
89
Followers
2.1K
Followers
8.8K
Followers
47
Votes
564
Votes
59
Votes
14
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
Pros
  • 48
    Easy
  • 8
    ASG integration
  • 2
    Reliability
  • 1
    Coding
  • 0
    SSL offloading
Pros
  • 2
    API Gateway
  • 2
    Service Worker
  • 2
    Load balancer
  • 2
    Edge
  • 2
    Extremely versatile
Integrations
No integrations available
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Django
Django
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
Redwood
Redwood
Remix
Remix
Phoenix Framework
Phoenix Framework
Crystal
Crystal
Rails
Rails
Rust
Rust
Golang
Golang
Docker
Docker

What are some alternatives to HAProxy, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Fly?

Heroku

Heroku

Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud is a polyglot cloud application platform. The service helps developers to build applications with many languages and services, with auto-scaling features and a true pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine

Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.

Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat OpenShift

OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

Render

Render

Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.

Hasura

Hasura

An open source GraphQL engine that deploys instant, realtime GraphQL APIs on any Postgres database.

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.

Cloud 66

Cloud 66

Cloud 66 gives you everything you need to build, deploy and maintain your applications on any cloud, without the headache of dealing with "server stuff". Frameworks: Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Jamstack, Laravel, GoLang, and more.

Jelastic

Jelastic

Jelastic is a Multi-Cloud DevOps PaaS for ISVs, telcos, service providers and enterprises needing to speed up development, reduce cost of IT infrastructure, improve uptime and security.

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