30,000 updates per day: dynamic Kubernetes routing with HAProxy Map API at PayPal

As Kubernetes adoption accelerates, organizations face growing complexity in managing service discovery, traffic routing, and dynamic scaling. This presentation explores PayPal's journey from using open-source HAProxy to implementing HAProxy Enterprise and HAProxy Fusion Control Plane to address the challenges of scale in our Kubernetes environment.

What you'll learn:

• Methods for handling thousands of backends at scale (tested up to 70k backends)
• Implementing near-instantaneous service discovery
• Benefits of using a dedicated control plane for managing the data plane at scale
• Strategies for bidirectional routing and active-standby deployment
• How PayPal manages 30-40 config updates per minute

While the open-source HAProxy version is excellent, PayPal's scale necessitated the transition to HAProxy Fusion for more efficient management. We'll share how HAProxy Fusion significantly improved our automation capabilities, enabling high-throughput configuration updates and enhanced statistics handling when managing tens of thousands of backends. The presentation will highlight both the Map API and service discovery features of HAProxy Fusion, demonstrating how they can be leveraged to optimize Kubernetes deployments without service interruptions.