HAProxy: Fast and reliable reverse-proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications
HAProxy is a self-hosted reverse proxy tool. Fast and reliable reverse-proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications.
Why self-host HAProxy
Running HAProxy yourself means you control the data, the uptime policy, and the upgrade schedule. That is a different relationship with software than subscribing to a hosted service.
What it does
HAProxy falls into the Reverse Proxy category of self-hosted software. It is designed to be deployed on your own infrastructure, whether that is a home server, a VPS, or a local machine running Docker.
Community traction
The project has 5k stars on GitHub, which is a reasonable proxy for how widely it is used. Active repositories tend to ship bug fixes faster and have better documentation than projects that stall after the initial release.
Deployment
Like most modern self-hosted apps, HAProxy supports Docker. A single compose file handles the deployment in most cases.
Maturity
The current release is 3.0.0. The project has moved past early development and tends to ship stable, documented releases.
License
It is licensed under GPL/LGPL, making it freely available for personal and commercial use.
Links
If the use case fits, HAProxy is a solid choice. Most of the complexity is in the initial deploy, and the day-to-day operation is low maintenance.