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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 HAProxy vs Pound

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs HAProxy vs Pound

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

HAProxy
HAProxy
Stacks2.6K
Followers2.1K
Votes564
Pound
Pound
Stacks11
Followers24
Votes0
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
Stacks12.8K
Followers8.8K
Votes59

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

Introduction

When choosing between AWS Elastic Load Balancing, HAProxy, and Pound for load balancing purposes, it is essential to understand the key differences to make an informed decision.

  1. Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs. HAProxy and Pound - Service Type: AWS Elastic Load Balancing is a fully managed service offered by AWS, reducing the operational overhead for users. On the other hand, HAProxy and Pound are open-source software that requires users to manage the setup, configuration, and maintenance of the load balancer themselves.

  2. Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs. HAProxy and Pound - Scalability: AWS Elastic Load Balancing automatically scales with traffic, seamlessly handling fluctuations in load. In comparison, HAProxy and Pound may require manual intervention to scale and might have limitations based on server resources.

  3. Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs. HAProxy and Pound - Cost: AWS Elastic Load Balancing is a paid service, with costs based on usage and features. HAProxy and Pound, being open-source, have no licensing costs but may necessitate additional expenses for server resources and maintenance.

  4. Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs. HAProxy and Pound - Configuration Flexibility: HAProxy and Pound offer a high level of customization and configuration options, allowing for fine-tuning based on specific requirements. AWS Elastic Load Balancing, while easier to set up, might have limitations in terms of customization.

  5. Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs. HAProxy and Pound - Protocols Supported: Elastic Load Balancing supports a wide range of protocols and services, making it versatile for different types of applications. HAProxy and Pound also support various protocols but might require more manual configuration to enable certain features.

  6. Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs. HAProxy and Pound - Community Support: HAProxy and Pound have been around for a longer time and have a strong community base, offering extensive documentation, forums, and support channels. While AWS Elastic Load Balancing has official support from AWS, the community aspect might be more limited compared to open-source solutions.

In summary, understanding the differences in service type, scalability, cost, configuration flexibility, protocols supported, and community support can help in deciding between AWS Elastic Load Balancing, HAProxy, and Pound for load balancing needs.

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Detailed Comparison

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

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.

Pound was developed to enable distributing the load among several Web-servers and to allow for a convenient SSL wrapper for those Web servers that do not offer it natively.

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.

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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).
Statistics
Stacks
2.6K
Stacks
11
Stacks
12.8K
Followers
2.1K
Followers
24
Followers
8.8K
Votes
564
Votes
0
Votes
59
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
Pros
  • 48
    Easy
  • 8
    ASG integration
  • 2
    Reliability
  • 1
    Coding
  • 0
    SSL offloading
Integrations
No integrations availableNo integrations available
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2

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

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.

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.

GLBC

GLBC

It is a GCE L7 load balancer controller that manages external loadbalancers configured through the Kubernetes Ingress API.

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