What we learned at HAProxyConf 2022

Great food, excellent wine and a general strike of the public transportation system on the day you need to get home.
Truly, the French experience.

If you’re wondering what we were doing in France, than you have not been following our social media. Shame on you.
This past week, Paris was the center of the load balancing world hosting HAProxyConf.
Let us remind you, HAProxyConf is a two-day event held in Paris that gathers HAProxy users, cloud architects, and developers from all over the world. Expert speakers talked about the best practices and real-world use cases that demonstrate how to apply HAProxy Technologies to deliver a complete and secure application delivery platform.
We’re used to HAProxy delivering an excellent product, turns out they can deliver a great conference as well. When you get back from a conference with new ideas and excited about the technology, you know it was a good one.
You can check the atmosphere in the pictures in this post.

We figured it would be nice to share a few highlights.
First of all, if you manage a large fleet of HAProxy LBs, HAProxy Fusion Control Plane, the star of the conference is something you might consider.
Also, we’re looking forward to the new version of HAProxy Dataplane API which will support all the HAProxy configuration keywords.
This will make life so much easier and opens up lots of opportunities, can’t wait to give it a try.

Engineers working in different business than us,use HAProxy in the most imaginative way.

Did it ever occur to you to use HAProxy Lua extension to implement MFA for email authentication for a large number of employees? Me neither.
Or using it to anonymize servers during a CTF competition or it being used by AWS to boost performance of their products.

Listening to the development story of the Kubernetes HAProxy ingress controller we use in our K8S clusters (Hint hint, don’t be shy and contact us if you need K8S help), was very insightful.
What’s even better is having the chance to chat with the authors and get some more insights on the internals.

This is also a good point in favor of in person conferences as opposed to online.
I mean, how often can you get suggestions during the QA of your talk directly from the author?
Shoutout to Willy Tarreau for caring so much about the tool and helping people use it efficiently.

As mentioned earlier HAProxy delivers a great product, which was more than clear by the multitude of companies using it to handle an enormous amounts of traffic and users
You’ve most likely been a HAProxy client without even realizing it, as it is a tool that can truly be used anywhere.
What makes it useful is its amazing performance when compared to similar tools. As pointed out in Willy’s keynote, this has far greater impacts that you may imagine.

Like all other products, with great feature come some bugs too. It was nice to hear a talk about the way this issues were identified and fixed, truly a testament of the power of open source and the community behind it.

If you’d like to know more about HAProxy and how we use it, we’ve written extensively about it. Check out our blog.

This conference is definitely worth the trip. Au revoir HAProxyConf, see you next year!

By the way, Paris is beautiful, check out some of the most interesting points in the pictures down below.