From 1.5 into the Future: How HAProxy Rose from a Simple Load Balancer Replacement Into our Swiss Army Knife

At Willhaben, we run Austria’s largest classified advertising marketplace. We started using HAProxy due to our need to move to an all-HTTPS environment. Since then, we’ve leveraged HAProxy for geo-redundancy, HTTP/2, integration with Kubernetes, and blocking suspicious activity. In this talk, I will explain how we gradually shifted from basic HAProxy functionality to our current deployment, and will also describe where we encountered trouble in our production environment and how we overcame it. We are currently serving 5-6 gigabits per second of peak traffic via HAProxy, with about 20k requests per second.