The sun has officially set on KubeCon North America 2023, but the CNCF's flagship event has left a lasting impression on us. Roughly 9,000 Kubernetes enthusiasts descended on Chicago's McCormick Place West to see the K8s community's latest innovations. DevOps professionals, engineers, and architects alike were eager to share and boost their K8s knowledge. Overall, HAProxy joined over 250 other sponsor organizations to celebrate open-source, cloud-native technologies over four activity-packed days.

Robust app security is non-negotiable, but the spiraling costs that can come with it are. In the context of application delivery, security plays a pivotal role in maintaining business continuity, protecting sensitive data, and upholding a solid reputation. However, the journey to build a formidable defense at the load balancing and reverse proxy layer can quickly become costly with a few wrong turns. Security is important, but buyers don’t have to break the bank to implement it.

Boosting the transparency of your load balancer traffic is advantageous. Web applications continually pass information back and forth, yet some of this important data is often hard to get during transit. And while the perceived “black box” nature of networking seems overwhelming, what if you could peek behind the curtain to better understand your traffic?

The intersection of economic uncertainty and digital transformation presents a unique challenge for businesses. With the fear of a recession looming overhead, there’s no doubt that choppy waters await, but what does this mean for IT when tech spending can significantly impact the bottom line? While IT spending is a priority for many, businesses are still seeking ways to reduce non-essential spending and upgrade outdated infrastructure.

The G2 Fall 2023 Reports are in! And while leaves are on the verge of tumbling downward, HAProxy's acclaim across multiple categories, market levels, and global segments has only risen. For companies looking for—or migrating from—a load-balancing solution, HAProxy delivers simple adoption, scalable performance, strong security, and observable operation. Altogether, across six product categories HAProxy featured in 58 reports and won 30 badges, including “Momentum Leader”.

HAProxy Enterprise 2.8 and HAProxy ALOHA 15.5 are now available. Users of our enterprise-class software load balancer and hardware/virtual load balancer appliance who upgrade to the latest versions will benefit from all the features announced in the community version, HAProxy 2.8, plus some features that enhance the flexibility of our enterprise security options to meet even more use cases.

Internet protocols are the lifeblood of internet communication, powering important connections between servers, clients, and networking devices. These rules and standards also determine how data traverses the web. Without these protocols, internet traffic as we know it would be severely fragmented or even grind to a screeching halt. And without evolving protocol development, the web couldn’t properly support the applications driving massive traffic volumes worldwide (or vice versa).

Managing your load balancer instances is important while using HAProxy. You might encounter errors, need to apply configurations, or periodically upgrade HAProxy to a newer version (to name a few examples). As a result, reloading or restarting HAProxy is often the secret ingredient to restoring intended functionality. Whether you’re relatively inexperienced with HAProxy or you’re a grizzled veteran, understanding which method is best in a given situation is crucial.

The curtain rose and fell on another spectacular Black Hat USA, the conference set against the backdrop of fabulous Las Vegas in the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. We knew upon hitting the Strip that all the glamor and neon lights were just the preshow for the main event: innovation and the latest in cybersecurity. We couldn’t wait to show attendees and fellow vendors what we had to offer.