Hello, I am looking for a alternative to HA Proxy, as the GUI options for it, are both third-party and not very good looking, also I just want to know about the alternatives, what I am looking in a high availability setup is the ability to detect if a server is offline, and route to other servers, as well as other HA goodies.
Maybe nginx proxy manager can do this.
If your requirement is a GUI, you’re not going to find anything. HA Proxy is also the most performant out of anything out there last I looked, and it’s got one of the simplest configuration setups.
- Traefik: kinda slow, mostly meant for large numbers of microservices, pretty verbose configuration
- Envoy: middle of the road, also most meant for cloud services, but should work with anything
- nginx: does have a popular 3rd party GUI, seems to be confusing for most that don’t work with it a lot
- caddy: fewer LB specific options if you’re just talking about service routing and response time, pretty easy to confirm for most, and some sort of decent 3rd party UIs, but they won’t have all the options available.
I use HAProxy and Caddy, and for different reasons:
- HAProxy - sni-based proxying to devices on my VPN; lives on my VPS
- Caddy - TLS-trunking (and cert renewal) per device and reverse proxy in front of containers
It works really well. My router is configured as a DNS server to route my domains to my local network, so I get to use TLS even on my LAN, which is neat.
I can confirm caddy is more of a high availability proxy than a proper load balancer, but it does it’s job and has an api you can hook up to a gui if you want. Or like I do - to a config repo with ci/cd deployment.
apache can do load balancing as well https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_proxy_balancer.html
I’d pick something that you already use across your stack, to minimize the number of different integration/config styles/bugs…
Pretty much all of them.
I didn’t know haproxy had a GUI, but the config files are very simple. I would just modify an example one and call it good.
Opnsense kinda has a webUI for HAProxy, but it’s also not very good.
I recommend learning the config files, since HAProxy is probably the best option for a HA load balancer.
What do you want the UI for? For configuration it’s usually meh because it’s the kind of thing you configure by config file, often generated config files even. For stats it’s where it gets interesting, usually third-party options like Grafana is used along with something like Prometheus to collect the metrics.
When it comes to easy configuration, newer options go for the zero configuration angle rather than a nice UI to configure it. Just need some Docker tags and Traefik automagically configures itself, so the UI is just for viewing information.
If you’re ok with closed source and 20mbps, kemp makes a free version:
