Five nines is no longer a myth.

Network Design Flaws

A well-designed system is the first line of defense against downtime. Minimizing failure-points by running a website across several servers is key, with a seamless backup plan for outages like HAProxy Enterprise’s automatic failover settings when one goes down.

But keeping a network healthy is always preferable to a server taking a sick day. In order to ward off these interruptions before they strike, benefit from the advanced health checks offered by the HAProxy suite of products to continually monitor your servers for downtime and errors. And when components do fall under-the-weather, support for retry requests on other servers as well as circuit breaking means that traffic can be routed around unhealthy server groups during longer outages.

The same principles apply for the load balancers themselves. By creating a cluster of load balancing instances you enable redundancy in case one fails, and with support tools for an Active/Active or Active/Passive setup, your backup load balancing instances will always be ready. And with the HAProxy Fusion Control Plane you can fluidly manage the setup and configuration of these multiple load balancers all in one place.

Security Attacks

The internet can be a dangerous place. Given load balancers are often the first line of defense against unwanted visitors, taking advantage of a sophisticated security system like the HAProxy Enterprise Web Application Firewall to scan requests for malicious payloads as they arrive will allow you to stop threats before they can reach your servers and disrupt your uptime.

Defending against denial-of-service threats can necessitate a different response. A network layer solution like HAProxy ALOHA’s PacketShield is another approach, and ideal for stateful packet filtering of illegitimate traffic.

Deployment Risks

Continuous delivery can mean that application deployments happen frequently, even several times per hour, meaning that updates must be carefully planned so visitors can continue to be routed through as services reboot.

Taking advantage of HAProxy Enterprise’s slow start and stop will steadily increase and drain traffic to servers as they undergo this process. Hitless reloads also allows seamless updates on the Load Balancer itself – meaning that it can continue to route traffic as configurations are updated.

Fine-Tuning for Strength

Round out your strategy for high availability with our range of other features for monitoring and traffic control. With the most detailed metrics of any load balancing solution and robust support for third-party monitoring systems, HAProxy Enterprise helps you pinpoint your errors to fix them as they occur.

Additional features like timeouts and connection pooling also mean that your servers are always running at maximum efficiency, alongside other options like traffic overload protection to keep each load at a manageable level with queues.