HAProxy offers a powerful logging system that allows users to capture information about HTTP transactions. As part of that, logging headers provides insight into what's happening behind the scenes, such as when a web application firewall (WAF) blocks a request because of a problematic header. It can also be helpful when an application has trouble parsing a header, allowing you to review the logged headers to ensure that they conform to a specific format.

In case you missed it, HAProxy Technologies recently put out a press release about our stunning leadership position in G2’s Summer 2023 Grid® Reports for load balancing. We’re incredibly proud of these results, which are a direct result of the hard work and dedication of HAProxy’s community developers and our enterprise product and support teams. Looking at the Momentum Grid® Report for Load Balancing, the gap between HAProxy and the rest is impossible to ignore.

The Kubernetes networking landscape is shifting. The traditional Kubernetes Ingress approach is being complemented and, in some cases, replaced by a more powerful, flexible, and extensible standard: the Kubernetes Gateway API. Kubernetes has become the go-to platform for orchestrating and managing containerized applications. A key aspect of Kubernetes that's crucial for the functionality of these applications? Networking.

SysOps teams know how crucial observability is to maintaining around-the-clock infrastructure health. And while HAProxy already provides reliable logging and stats (for diagnostics and monitoring), what if you could supplement those with a real-time alerting system? That idea inspired our initial inclusion of mailers in HAProxy. Since then, users have been asking for deeper mailer customizability—and we’re thrilled to deliver that with Lua-based email alerts in HAProxy 2.8.

TLS certificates are crucial for the secure flow of web traffic, but managing these digital certificates can pose a challenge. Using an ACME-based certificate authority like Let’s Encrypt can automate and simplify the management of issuing these certificates. Certificate management in HAProxy has steadily improved over the years, allowing it to become more flexible and load certificates without restarting.

We are proud to announce that we have released HAProxy Data Plane API 2.8, available on our GitHub page. This release follows the recent HAProxy 2.8 release and incorporates its changes, along with some improvements and changes specific to the API. HAProxy Data Plane API 2.8 adds new keywords focused on QUIC, OCSP stapling, and tuning options that allow you to customize your HAProxy process using the HTTP REST API programmatically.

In this article, we’ll take you on a quick tour of the new Lua event framework shipped with HAProxy 2.8—plus demonstrate how Lua helps you further customize HAProxy’s behavior. We’ll start with a brief, high-level overview of Lua and how HAProxy uses it. Next, we’ll introduce you to the Lua event framework, show you what you can do with it, and familiarize you with its mechanics.

HTTP/3 is the latest generation of the HTTP protocol, and its ability to serve applications over QUIC offers several advantages for user experience, including reduced latency, improved reliability, and faster page loading as a result of fixing the head-of-line blocking issue in previous versions of HTTP. Both HAProxy and HAProxy Enterprise offer support for using HTTP/3 over QUIC, although the steps for enabling QUIC in HAProxy and HAProxy Enterprise are different.

HAProxy Fusion Control Plane gives you power to simplify, scale, and secure your HAProxy Enterprise infrastructure using a centralized orchestration solution, making it easier to extend HAProxy Enterprise’s security and performance across on-premises and cloud-hosted applications. With the release of version 1.1, HAProxy Fusion is more secure, more flexible, and even easier to use.