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HAProxy vs Kubernetes: What are the differences?

Introduction

This Markdown code compares and highlights key differences between HAProxy and Kubernetes. It provides a concise summary of the differences in a specific and informative manner.

  1. Scalability: HAProxy is mainly designed for load balancing and high availability in a single data center. It can handle a large number of concurrent connections efficiently, making it suitable for high-traffic websites. On the other hand, Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that enables seamless scaling across multiple data centers or cloud providers. It provides features like auto-scaling and load balancing to efficiently manage larger deployments.

  2. Architecture: HAProxy is a reverse proxy that sits between clients and servers, distributing incoming requests to backend servers based on defined rules. It supports various load balancing algorithms, such as round-robin and least connections, to distribute the load evenly. Kubernetes, on the other hand, manages containers and their lifecycle, ensuring the desired number of replicas are running and distributing traffic to them using a service abstraction.

  3. Deployment Flexibility: HAProxy can be deployed as an independent application on physical or virtual servers, utilizing the available resources efficiently. It offers flexibility in terms of deployment options as it can be installed on bare metal servers, VMs, or in containers. Kubernetes, on the other hand, provides a platform for managing containerized applications, allowing for automated deployment, scaling, and management of applications across a cluster of nodes. It abstracts the underlying infrastructure, making it easier to deploy applications on different cloud providers.

  4. Granularity of Control: HAProxy offers detailed control over load balancing algorithms, health checks, SSL termination, and other configuration options. It allows for fine-tuning based on specific application requirements. Kubernetes, on the other hand, focuses on managing the lifecycle of containers and ensures high availability and scalability. It provides higher-level abstractions like services and controllers, abstracting away the underlying infrastructure details.

  5. Application Support: HAProxy is protocol-agnostic and can handle various TCP and HTTP-based applications. It supports features like SSL termination, content-based routing, and server health checks, making it suitable for a wide range of applications. Kubernetes, on the other hand, focuses on managing containers and their lifecycle, providing features like service discovery, load balancing, and rolling updates for containerized applications.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: HAProxy has a well-established and active community with extensive documentation, support, and a wide range of plugins and modules available. It has been adopted and used in production by many organizations. Kubernetes, on the other hand, has gained rapid adoption due to its popularity and the backing of major companies like Google. It has a vibrant ecosystem, with a large number of community-contributed tools, extensions, and integrations, making it easier to use and extend.

In summary, HAProxy focuses on load balancing and high availability within a single data center, offering scalability, deployment flexibility, and fine-grained control. Kubernetes, on the other hand, is a container orchestration platform that enables seamless scaling across multiple data centers or cloud providers, providing features like automated deployment, service discovery, and management of containerized applications.

Decisions about HAProxy and Kubernetes
Simon Reymann
Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 11.9M views

Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

  • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
  • Respectively Git as revision control system
  • SourceTree as Git GUI
  • Visual Studio Code as IDE
  • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
  • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
  • SonarQube as quality gate
  • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
  • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
  • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
  • Heroku for deploying in test environments
  • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
  • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
  • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
  • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
  • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

  • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
  • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
  • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
  • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
  • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
  • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
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Pros of HAProxy
Pros of Kubernetes
  • 132
    Load balancer
  • 102
    High performance
  • 69
    Very fast
  • 58
    Proxying for tcp and http
  • 55
    SSL termination
  • 31
    Open source
  • 27
    Reliable
  • 20
    Free
  • 18
    Well-Documented
  • 12
    Very popular
  • 7
    Runs health checks on backends
  • 7
    Suited for very high traffic web sites
  • 6
    Scalable
  • 5
    Ready to Docker
  • 4
    Powers many world's most visited sites
  • 3
    Simple
  • 2
    Ssl offloading
  • 2
    Work with NTLM
  • 1
    Available as a plugin for OPNsense
  • 1
    Redis
  • 166
    Leading docker container management solution
  • 129
    Simple and powerful
  • 107
    Open source
  • 76
    Backed by google
  • 58
    The right abstractions
  • 25
    Scale services
  • 20
    Replication controller
  • 11
    Permission managment
  • 9
    Supports autoscaling
  • 8
    Simple
  • 8
    Cheap
  • 6
    Self-healing
  • 5
    Open, powerful, stable
  • 5
    Reliable
  • 5
    No cloud platform lock-in
  • 5
    Promotes modern/good infrascture practice
  • 4
    Scalable
  • 4
    Quick cloud setup
  • 3
    Custom and extensibility
  • 3
    Captain of Container Ship
  • 3
    Cloud Agnostic
  • 3
    Backed by Red Hat
  • 3
    Runs on azure
  • 3
    A self healing environment with rich metadata
  • 2
    Everything of CaaS
  • 2
    Gke
  • 2
    Golang
  • 2
    Easy setup
  • 2
    Expandable
  • 2
    Sfg

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Cons of HAProxy
Cons of Kubernetes
  • 6
    Becomes your single point of failure
  • 16
    Steep learning curve
  • 15
    Poor workflow for development
  • 8
    Orchestrates only infrastructure
  • 4
    High resource requirements for on-prem clusters
  • 2
    Too heavy for simple systems
  • 1
    Additional vendor lock-in (Docker)
  • 1
    More moving parts to secure
  • 1
    Additional Technology Overhead

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What is HAProxy?

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.

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

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What companies use HAProxy?
What companies use Kubernetes?
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What tools integrate with HAProxy?
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What are some alternatives to HAProxy and Kubernetes?
NGINX
nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.
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.
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.
Squid
Squid reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages. Squid has extensive access controls and makes a great server accelerator. It runs on most available operating systems, including Windows and is licensed under the GNU GPL.
Varnish
Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on your architecture.
See all alternatives