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Haproxy VS Apache Thrift

Compare Haproxy VS Apache Thrift and see what are their differences

Haproxy logo Haproxy

Reliable, High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer

Apache Thrift logo Apache Thrift

An interface definition language and communication protocol for creating cross-language services.
  • Haproxy Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-19
  • Apache Thrift Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-07-12

Haproxy features and specs

  • High Performance
    HAProxy is known for its high efficiency and low latency, making it suitable for handling a large amount of traffic with minimal overhead.
  • Reliability
    The software is robust and stable, having been battle-tested in numerous large-scale environments, ensuring reliable performance under heavy loads.
  • Flexibility
    HAProxy supports a wide range of configurations, allowing it to be used in various scenarios, from simple load balancing to complex traffic routing.
  • Scalability
    With HAProxy, you can easily scale out your infrastructure by distributing the traffic across multiple servers, ensuring better resource utilization.
  • Health Checking
    HAProxy provides powerful health check mechanisms to monitor the status of backend servers and automatically remove unhealthy servers from the pool.
  • Open Source
    Being an open-source project, HAProxy is free to use and has a community of contributors that help improve and maintain the software continuously.
  • SSL Termination
    HAProxy supports SSL termination, which can offload the SSL decryption process from backend servers, improving overall performance.
  • Logging and Monitoring
    HAProxy offers comprehensive logging and monitoring features that allow administrators to gain insights into traffic patterns and server health.

Possible disadvantages of Haproxy

  • Complex Configuration
    Setting up HAProxy can be complex and may require a deep understanding of its configuration syntax and options, particularly for advanced use cases.
  • Lack of Built-in GUI
    HAProxy does not come with a built-in graphical user interface (GUI), which can make management more difficult for users who prefer visual tools over command-line interfaces.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    For beginners, the learning curve can be steep due to the advanced features and extensive configuration options provided by HAProxy.
  • Limited Application Layer Features
    While HAProxy excels at load balancing and basic traffic management, it lacks some application layer features that specialized application delivery controllers (ADCs) might offer.
  • Resource Intensive
    In certain high-traffic scenarios, HAProxy may consume significant CPU and memory resources, potentially requiring hardware upgrades.

Apache Thrift features and specs

  • Cross-Language Support
    Apache Thrift supports numerous programming languages including Java, Python, C++, Ruby, and more, enabling seamless communication between services written in different languages.
  • Efficient Serialization
    Thrift offers efficient binary serialization which helps in reducing the payload size and improves the communication speed between services.
  • Service Definition Flexibility
    Thrift provides a robust interface definition language (IDL) for defining and generating code for services with strict type checking, fostering strong contract interfaces.
  • Scalability
    Due to its lightweight and efficient serialization mechanisms, Apache Thrift can handle a large number of simultaneous client connections, making it suitable for scalable distributed systems.
  • Versioning Support
    Thrift supports service versioning which helps in evolving APIs without disrupting existing services or clients.

Possible disadvantages of Apache Thrift

  • Steep Learning Curve
    For new users, especially those not familiar with RPC frameworks, learning and understanding Thrift’s IDL and operations can be complex and time-consuming.
  • Documentation and Community Support
    Compared to some alternative technologies, Apache Thrift's documentation and community support can be less robust, which might pose challenges in troubleshooting or seeking guidance.
  • Lack of Advanced Features
    Thrift does not support some advanced features like streaming or multiplexing out of the box, which could limit its use in complex systems requiring these functionalities.
  • Infrastructure Overhead
    Integrating Thrift into an existing system might introduce infrastructure overhead both in initial setup and ongoing maintenance, especially when dealing with multiple languages.
  • Protocol Limitations
    While Thrift is highly efficient, its protocol limitations might require additional workarounds for certain data structures or transport mechanisms, complicating development.

Haproxy videos

HAProxy Crash Course (TLS 1.3, HTTPS, HTTP/2 and more)

More videos:

  • Review - HAPROXY vs NGINX - 10,000 requests while killing servers
  • Tutorial - How To Setup ACME, Let's Encrypt, and HAProxy HTTPS offloading on pfsense

Apache Thrift videos

Apache Thrift

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Haproxy and Apache Thrift)
Web Servers
62 62%
38% 38
Web And Application Servers
Network & Admin
100 100%
0% 0
Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Haproxy and Apache Thrift

Haproxy Reviews

Top 5 Open Source Load Balancers in 2024
Widely regarded as a stalwart in the open source community, HAProxy has evolved into a versatile and powerful load balancing solution. HAProxy stands as a silent sentinel, orchestrating the seamless flow of data for some of the world's most visited websites. As a free, exceptionally fast, and reliable reverse-proxy, HAProxy is not just a load balancer; it's a digital maestro...
10 Awesome Open Source Load Balancers
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...
10 Open Source Load Balancer for HA and Improved Performance
One of the popular ones out there in the market is to provide high availability, proxy, TCP/HTTP load-balancing. HAProxy is used by some of the reputed brands in the world, like below.
Source: geekflare.com
Top 5 Open-Source Load Balancers 2021
HAProxy provides many distinct features such as it processes an enormous number of tasks in a millisecond, offers minimal cost for context switch and memory usage, ability to instantly detect a threat or event on tens of thousands of connections, efficient use of the CPU cycles, and memory bandwidth, optimized timer queue, optimized HTTP header analysis, GZip Compression,...
Source: linuxways.net
The 5 Best Open Source Load Balancers
HAProxy is another common name in the web ecosystem. HAProxy offers reverse proxying and load balancing of TCP and HTTP traffic. When you choose HAProxy, you’re choosing a high-performance, well-established solution.
Source: logz.io

Apache Thrift Reviews

We have no reviews of Apache Thrift yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apache Thrift should be more popular than Haproxy. It has been mentiond 13 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Haproxy mentions (2)

  • HA Proxy For MySQL Master – Slave
    Root@haproxy01:~# haproxy -v HA-Proxy version 2.0.13-2ubuntu0.3 2021/08/27 - https://haproxy.org/ How to Install it? You simply use yum or apt commands to install it Sudo apt install -y haproxy. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • cannot get haproxy / mjpeg streamer to play nice together
    HA-Proxy version 2.2.9-2+deb11u3 2022/03/10 - https://haproxy.org/ maxconn 4096 user haproxy group haproxy daemon log 127.0.0.1 local0 debug Defaults log global mode http option httplog option dontlognull retries 3 option redispatch option http-server-close option forwardfor maxconn 2000 ... Source: almost 3 years ago

Apache Thrift mentions (13)

  • Show HN: TypeSchema – A JSON specification to describe data models
    I once read a paper about Apache/Meta Thrift [1,2]. It allows you to define data types/interfaces in a definition file and generate code for many programming languages. It was specifically designed for RPCs and microservices. [1]: https://thrift.apache.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • Delving Deeper: Enriching Microservices with Golang with CloudWeGo
    While gRPC and Apache Thrift have served the microservice architecture well, CloudWeGo's advanced features and performance metrics set it apart as a promising open source solution for the future. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Reddit System Design/Architecture
    Services in general communicate via Thrift (and in some cases HTTP). Source: about 2 years ago
  • Universal type language!
    Protocol Buffers is the most popular one, but there are many others such as Apache Thrift and my own Typical. Source: about 2 years ago
  • You worked on it? Why is it slow then?
    RPC is not strictly OO, but you can think of RPC calls like method calls. In general it will reflect your interface design and doesn't have to be top-down, although a good project usually will look that way. A good contrast to REST where you use POST/PUT/GET/DELETE pattern on resources where as a procedure call could be a lot more flexible and potentially lighter weight. Think of it like defining methods in code... Source: over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Haproxy and Apache Thrift, you can also consider the following products

nginx - A high performance free open source web server powering busiest sites on the Internet.

Docker Hub - Docker Hub is a cloud-based registry service

Traefik - Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy

Eureka - Eureka is a contact center and enterprise performance through speech analytics that immediately reveals insights from automated analysis of communications including calls, chat, email, texts, social media, surveys and more.

SKUDONET - Scale easy and avoid system disruptions with the ADC challengers through high availability, load balancing, security and high performance.

AWS Elastic Load Balancing - Amazon ELB automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances in the cloud.