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

Google Cloud Load Balancing vs HAProxy

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

HAProxy
HAProxy
Stacks2.6K
Followers2.1K
Votes564
Google Cloud Load Balancing
Google Cloud Load Balancing
Stacks50
Followers45
Votes0

Google Cloud Load Balancing vs HAProxy: What are the differences?

Introduction

Google Cloud Load Balancing and HAProxy are both tools used in website development for load balancing purposes. However, there are several key differences between these two solutions.

  1. Flexibility and Scalability: Google Cloud Load Balancing is a fully managed service provided by Google Cloud Platform, which means it offers high scalability and flexibility. It can automatically scale up or down based on the demand without requiring any manual intervention. On the other hand, HAProxy is an open-source load balancer that needs to be managed and configured manually, making it less flexible and scalable compared to Google Cloud Load Balancing.

  2. Cost: Google Cloud Load Balancing is a paid service and its cost is based on the total volume of data processed, as well as the number of forwarding rules and target instances. On the other hand, HAProxy is an open-source software, meaning it is free to use, which can be a significant cost-saving factor for small or budget-conscious projects.

  3. Integration with Google Cloud Platform: Google Cloud Load Balancing seamlessly integrates with other services and features offered by Google Cloud Platform. It is tightly integrated with Google's infrastructure, allowing easy integration with other cloud services like Compute Engine and Cloud CDN. HAProxy, being a standalone open-source software, requires additional manual configuration and integration efforts to work with Google Cloud Platform's services.

  4. Advanced Load Balancing Features: Google Cloud Load Balancing offers advanced features like support for global traffic distribution, SSL/TLS termination, HTTP/2 support, and content-based traffic routing rules. These features are designed to provide efficient load balancing and improve website performance. In contrast, HAProxy provides basic load balancing capabilities and may lack some of the more advanced features offered by Google Cloud Load Balancing.

  5. Ease of Use: Google Cloud Load Balancing is designed to be user-friendly and requires minimal configuration, making it easy to set up and manage. It offers a web-based interface and command-line tools for configuration and monitoring. On the other hand, HAProxy requires more technical expertise and knowledge to configure and manage effectively, as it involves manual configuration files and command-line interfaces.

  6. Support and Documentation: Google Cloud Load Balancing is backed by Google's professional support and offers comprehensive documentation and resources for troubleshooting and resolving issues. On the other hand, HAProxy, being an open-source project, relies on community support and documentation, which may not be as extensive or readily available as the support offered by Google Cloud Load Balancing.

In summary, Google Cloud Load Balancing offers more flexibility, scalability, advanced features, and ease of use compared to HAProxy, which is a manually configured open-source load balancer. Although HAProxy is free and provides basic load balancing capabilities, it may lack the seamless integration and advanced features provided by Google Cloud Load Balancing.

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Detailed Comparison

HAProxy
HAProxy
Google Cloud Load Balancing
Google Cloud Load Balancing

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.

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.

-
Autoscaling; No pre-warming needed
Statistics
Stacks
2.6K
Stacks
50
Followers
2.1K
Followers
45
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
Integrations
No integrations available
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform

What are some alternatives to HAProxy, Google Cloud Load Balancing?

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.

GLBC

GLBC

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

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