Moving Yammer to the Cloud: Building a Scalable and Secure Service Mesh with HAProxy

Yammer is a social networking tool built into Microsoft 365 to openly engage and connect across your organization. Yammer has been a long-time user of HAProxy to load balance its application stack. When we moved to Microsoft Azure, we transitioned to a design that relies heavily on container orchestration. We wanted to build a robust, performant and scalable service mesh that would provide us the necessary tooling and features to flourish in Azure. Convinced that client-side load balancing was the way to go, we started off on a journey to adapt HAProxy for the task. In this talk, I will describe that journey, the challenges, and the successes we've had in building our client-side load balancing solution.