Thanks for the feedback. I've provided a few replies below but I think you have made some great points and I will share them internally.
> - the site does not do a good job of describing the products and what they do.
The page does lead off by telling you it is a software load balancer, but I agree, we can do a better job of giving more information on the product itself. Most people who pursue HAProxy Enterprise are already familiar with HAProxy. With that said, we're actually working on a complete overhaul to this page and I believe the new version will address this.
> - it is hard to find requirements from the first page.
This is just a reference point and typically organizations are working closely with a sales engineer.
> - is there a simpler HA setup than the 3 layer one here:
A simpler version is found under active/standby here [1]
Thank you. Just for info, my personal experience working for a very big American company is that every time I call a product company for information, I get intensely called back months in a row even if the product does not meet our needs, so I prefer not to do that anymore and to dig myself for info until I figure if that is looking very promising. Maybe it is not the same in your case, but who acts assuming it's an exception?
You don't need 5, especially when the load balancing is part of the network or infrastructure team that are a different group. Some companies have hardware load balancers, some use products like VMWare NSX or both, depending on the needs. When you are a Windows shop, HAProxy is not on the short list, hearing about it and actually knowing it are 2 different sides of the coin.
As someone who isn’t familiar with this space - is the use of HAProxy as a self hosted DDOS defense a “supported” (prioritized?) use case? I found old blog posts on this application of HAProxy but wasn’t sure if new development tries to improve those capabilities or if it is more focused on load balancing or other applications.
You can pass along timing data from every aspect of the request [1] currently there are approximately 20 events supported. You can also send over just about anything that can be stored within an HAProxy variable / header through a tag. Here's an example configuration for HAProxy (simple) [2] (advanced) [3] and the OpenTracing specific configuration (simple) [4] (advanced) [5]. I've included both simple and advanced configurations.
It sounds like ot is still in beta (but it's a little confusing that they're 1.0 but it has a message saying they're in beta on their main page).
It looks like it's being adopted by a few larger app monitoring products, wondering if datadog will follow suit or if they will stick with open tracing and their custom implementations for logging and metrics. I assume they will support ingestion from ot at some point though. It sounds neat tho, will definitely read up on it more.
The added support for FIX is interesting. As far as I can tell it's just TCP-level load balancing, is that right? HAProxy doesn't have the ability to, say, distribute each incoming order to a different backend server?
Sure, I saw that example. Maybe let me put it a different way: if a client has one inbound FIX connection to HAProxy, can HAProxy connect to N backend servers and send each FIX message from the single client connection to a different backend?
I have not tested that use case but I do not think so. It has the ability to parse FIX tag values and make routing decisions from the initial Logon message.
- the site does not do a good job of describing the products and what they do. https://www.haproxy.com/products/haproxy-enterprise-edition/ has a download button as the start and tells nothing about the product.
- it is hard to find requirements from the first page. (https://www.haproxy.com/documentation/hapee/2-2r1/getting-st...)
- is there any a page with basic architecture of the product? Some diagrams with typical configurations.
- is there a simpler HA setup than the 3 layer one here: https://www.haproxy.com/documentation/hapee/2-2r1/high-avail... ? What is the simplest HA configuration for 2 web servers?