10 Awesome Open Source Load Balancers

1

Traefik

Traefik is a reverse proxy and L7 load balancer. Written in Go, it’s designed to support microservices and container-powered services in a distributed system. It has native support for Docker Swarm and Kubernetes orchestration, as well as service registries such as etcd or Consul. It also offers extensive support for WebSocket, HTTP/2, and gRPC services. Traefik integrates well with popular monitoring systems such as Prometheus and Datadog, and provides metrics, tracing information, and logs for effective monitoring. A REST API enables a real-time control panel. Traefik Labs also offers an enterprise version of Traefik, with features such as OpenID and LDAP authentication.

#Web Servers #Web And Application Servers #Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy 34 social mentions

2

Haproxy

HAProxy is an L4 and L7 load balancer supporting TCP and UDP traffic. It’s a well-established, open source solution used by companies such as Airbnb and GitHub. HAProxy is also a very capable L7 load balancer, supporting HTTP/2 and gRPC backends. Thanks to its long history, large community, and reliable nature, HAProxy has become the de facto open source load balancer—it comes preloaded on many Linux distributions, and is even deployed on many cloud platforms.

#Web Servers #Web And Application Servers #Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy 2 social mentions

3

nginx

Nginx is a battle-tested piece of software written in C and initially introduced in 2004. Since then, it has grown to be an all-in-one reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy, and HTTP cache. It offers L7 load balancing support for HTTP, HTTPS, FastCGI, uWSGI, SCGI, Memcached, and gRPC backends. Nginx’s process worker model is highly scalable and deployed at large scales in organizations such as Adobe, Cloudflare, and OpenDNS. While HAProxy and Nginx are both robust, well-respected solutions, HAProxy is limited to only load balancing and proxying capabilities, whereas Nginx can also be used as a high-performance file server.

#Web And Application Servers #Web Servers #Application Server 46 social mentions

Katran is a C++ library built and used by Facebook for building high-performance L4 load balancers. It offers high-performance load balancing by processing packets in the kernel, working much closer to the hardware than other load balancers, and scales linearly with the networking hardware’s capability. As an L4 load balancer, Katran is more resilient in the face of network-related issues, and so can be useful for scaling L7 load balancers.

5

gobetween

gobetween is a container- and microservice-focused L4 load balancer and reverse proxy. Tested on Windows, Linux, and Mac, deploying gobetween is straightforward in native and containerized environments, requiring only a single executable binary and a JSON config file. Similar to Traefik, it offers real-time monitoring and management via a REST API. Service discovery is supported by various means, including DNS SRV records, Docker and Docker Swarm, Consul, and more. gobetween is designed to simplify the automatic discovery of services in a microservices environment.

#Network & Admin #Web Servers #Online Services 3 social mentions

6

OpenELB

OpenELB, formerly known as Porter, is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubated project designed for exposing LoadBalancer type Kubernetes resources in bare-metal, edge, and virtualized environments. Services in Kubernetes are exposed via LoadBalancer resources. Usually, a load balancer in a cloud vendor Kubernetes deployment would be one of the vendor-operated cloud-based load balancers noted previously. OpenELB is an open source implementation that brings the same seamless experience of managing Kubernetes service closer to bare-metal deployments.

#Web Servers #Web And Application Servers #Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy 2 social mentions

7

Mosn.io

MOSN is an L4 and L7 load balancer designed for cloud native and service mesh environments. It’s designed to be used with the xDS API to automatically discover services supported by various service meshes such as Istio. MOSN has support for TCP, HTTP, and RPC protocols such as SOFARPC.

#Web Servers #Web And Application Servers #Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy

8

MetalLB

MetalLB is another CNCF incubated project. It is a bare-metal implementation of the LoadBalancer network balancer resource type in Kubernetes. It is designed to bring the seamless experience of cloud network balancers to bare-metal Kubernetes deployments integrating with standard network equipment. For routing services, it uses standard routing protocols such as ARP, NDP, and BGP. It has a special Layer 2 load balancing mode that responds to ARP requests for specific services on a regular IPv4 Ethernet network. This implements a unique load-balancing system in which all Kubernetes service requests go to a single physical IP, from which they are spread across the service’s pods.

#Web Servers #Web And Application Servers #Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy 13 social mentions

9

Envoy

Envoy is a high-performance distributed proxy written in C++. It can be used as an L4 or L7 load balancer, and is designed for building large distributed service meshes and microservices. It simplifies building observability in large-scale services with the ability to create an Envoy mesh of services, has native support for distributed tracing, and offers wire-level monitoring of MongoDB, DynamoDB, and others. There is first-class support for HTTP/2 and gRPC across the mesh, and Envoy provides APIs for real-time management of the service mesh.

#Visitor Management System #Reception #Lobby Management 7 social mentions

Katran is a C++ library built and used by Facebook for building high-performance L4 load balancers. It offers high-performance load balancing by processing packets in the kernel, working much closer to the hardware than other load balancers, and scales linearly with the networking hardware’s capability. As an L4 load balancer, Katran is more resilient in the face of network-related issues, and so can be useful for scaling L7 load balancers.