HAProxy Zero to Hero: The Definitive In‑Depth Guide to High‑Performance Load Balancing
Introduction HAProxy is the de facto open-source load balancer and reverse proxy for high-traffic websites, APIs, and microservices. It’s fast, battle-tested, extremely configurable, and equally at home terminating TLS, routing based on headers or paths, defending against abuse, or load balancing TCP streams. This zero-to-hero guide takes you from first principles to production-ready configurations. We’ll cover installation, core concepts, practical configuration patterns, TLS, health checks, observability, advanced features like ACLs and stick tables, and safe reloads—with copy-and-pasteable examples. ...