Load Balancing with HAProxy: Open-source technology for better scalability, redundancy and availability in your IT infrastructure Paperback – December 5, 2016

This is a good introduction to HAProxy, with clear explanations and good examples. I am moving off of Cisco ACE 4710 and onto HAProxy, so this book is exactly what I want. I didnt want to spend any time figuring things out, I wanted it all laid out plain and simple.The only flaw with this book is the lack of a Table of Contents or an Index. I would imagine that is because its a print of digital book, so it would be difficult or impossible to come up with page numbers...maybe? It makes it difficult to find things, so I wrote up one myself and printed it and stuck it in the front of the book. Here it is:Chapter 1 - Hello, HAProxy 4 What is HAProxy 5 What is the history of the project? 6 Who uses it? 6 How does it work? 6 What are some of its benefits? 7 What platforms can it run on? 8 What does it cost? 8 Things it is not 9Chapter 2 - Installing HAProxy 11 Creating virtual machines with Vagrant 11 Installing on Ubuntu 14 Installing on Debian 17 Installing on CentOS 18 Installing with Docker 21Chapter 3 - Basics 27 Proxying Basics 28 Load Balancing Basics 35 TCP vs HTTP mode 37 Capturing the client’s IP address 39 Using ACLs 41 Enabling the HAProxy stats page 43Chapter 4 - Load Balancing Algorithms 51 Roundrobin algorithm 51 Weighted roundrobin algorithm 53 Leastconn algorithm 54 Weighted leastconn algorithm 55 Hash URI algorithm 56 First available algorithm 57Chapter 5 - Directing Traffic 60 Content switching on the URL path 60 Content switching on a URL parameter 64 Content switching on an HTTP header 65 Redirecting to another URL 66 Redirecting based on geolocation 68Chapter 6 - Detecting and Reacting to Failure 73 TCP-based health checks 74 HTTP-based health checks 76 Expecting specific responses 77 Relying on the status of another server 78 Setting up a backup server 80 Failing over when not enough servers are left 81 Observing all requests for errors 82 Monitoring for server downtime 83 Emailing alerts 87Chapter 7 - Server Persistence 92 Using a cookie to stick to a server 93 Using a stick-table for server persistence 94 Redispatching to another server 97 Forcing persistence on a down server 98 Ignoring persistence for some files 99Chapter 8 - Logging 101 Sending logs to syslog 101 Logging to a remote syslog server 104 Splitting up log messages by tag 107 Better TCP logging 108 Better HTTP logging 111 Logging cookies and headers 115 Separating errors into their own log file 116Chapter 9 - SSL and TLS 119 TLS Passthrough 120 TLS termination 125 TLS re-encryption 129 Redirecting HTTP traffic to HTTPS 130 Restricting versions of SSL 132 SSL ciphers 135Chapter 10 - Changing the Message 138 URL rewriting 138 Adding request headers 143 Adding response headers 145 Removing response headers 149 Compressing outgoing files with gzip 150 Device detection with 51Degrees 151Chapter 11 - Security 157 Running HAProxy in a chroot 157 Enabling basic authentication 160 Preventing too many parallel connections 162 Defending against HTTP slow requests 164 Rate limiting 168 Denying requests from an attacker for a time 171 Whitelisting IP addresses 173Chapter 12 - Command Line 176 Using socket commands 177 Enabling and disabling a server 179 Changing the weight of a server 180 Working with stick tables 182 Debugging the HAProxy service 184Chapter 13 - High Availability 187 Reloading without a restart 187 Adding a failover load balancer 190 Replicating stick-tables to peers 196 Syncing configurations 198

This book is an excellent resource for someone who needs to get up to speed quickly with HAProxy. It touches on just enough detail in just enough areas of the product to get you fluent in a couple of hours. As I read through each of the sections in the book, I kept saying to myself “Ah, OK..” or “now I see how that is connected”, etc. It was a tremendous resource for me with not one but two projects I inherited over the past few months. I still find myself checking back with it from time to time, to keep myself honest with some things.

The author is a good communicator and slowly goes through all the steps you need to get haproxy up and running. I used this book to get about 95% of what I need, and then stackoverflow covered the rest.The book uses version 1.6 however the latest version of haproxy is almost the same (from a configuration perspective), so don't let the old version put you off.Recommended!

Awesome book!! Super clear, great indeep explanation for all topics, and also I found super handy how Nick Ramirez also takes the time to explain other tools and commands that will help you along the way! I've read the book twice and even when now my load balancers configurations are better than ever before, I still haven't applied all the great ideas I've got from this book, still working on it :)To make sure that this book is with me wherever I go (in the office, at home or on the go) I've also purchased the Kindle versionThanks Nick Ramirez, you've done an amazing job!

Absolutely, this is a great book you will not be able to put down. The author wrote the book following the simple explain/ instruction. With this, you can start, also improve your HAProxy knowledge. I believe that you should have it.In our infrastructure, we still use HAProxy for load balancing/ reverse proxy. Additionally, most of our service are on cloud. So you can see, HAProxy is still needed in Cloud environment. So, don't hesitate to buy this book, then study.

This is how most technical books should be -- theory and practice walk hand-in-hand. Nick assumes no prior knowledge and objectively walks the reader through what HAProxy is, how to install/configure it, how to get most value out of it and how to use it for non-intuitive/advanced purposes.I had to probe through some gnarly production networking issues and wanted to quickly grok capabilities of HAProxy. This book was helped me the most. It was a fairly quick read (couple of hours), and a pleasurable one at that.

The basic commands and configuration of ha proxy are clearly explained. The next step is writing ansible scripts to automate configuration in conjunction with the presented vagrant files. What is missing is the docker version and how to set that up. Something for the next release?

This oriented me pretty well to what is possible with HAProxy. The code examples are formatted a little funky on my Kindle display, but still readable. I’m glad I spent the time reading it from cover to cover, so to speak. There wasn’t much at all that I didn’t find applicable to my needs.

Dieses kurte Buch ist sehr gut geschrieben (Englisch) und gibt eine sehr gute Übersicht über die Konfiguration von HA-Proxy. Man kann das sofort in die Praxis umsetzen. Die wichtigsten Themen werden besprochen. Ich wundere mich über die gute Qualität.

One of the best computing book I readVery educative. Very good explanations.Very didactic.

Very good resource but really could do with a ToC and index

Clear examples with explanations. Wish there was similar book for all advanced configurations as well including scripting.Highly recommended to get started with HAProxy.

Like the book so far. Learned a lot from it. and plus good deal !