HAProxy or High Availability Proxy is an open source TCP and HTTP load balancer and proxy server software. HAProxy has been written by Willy Tarreau in C, it supports SSL, compressions, keep-alive, custom log formats and header rewriting. HAProxy is a fast and lightweight proxy server and load balancer with a small memory footprint and low CPU usage. It is used by large sites like Github, StackOverflow, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter and others. It has become the most popular software load balancer and proxy server in the past years.
In this tutorial, you will get through the HAProxy installation and configuration on RHEL 8 / CentOS 8. We will install HAProxy on a single server and then install Nginx web server on the other servers. HAProxy will act as a load balancer for the Nginx web servers.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- HAProxy Architecture and Concepts
- Configure hosts file for name resolution
- Install and Configure HAProxy
- Install and Configure Nginx
- Testing the Load Balancing feature
- Access the HAProxy Stats URL