Automated migration to HAProxy One: a platform-agnostic approach

Dartmouth College built a unique Load Balancer as a Service (LBaaS) platform that lets us migrate from VMware NSX-ALB to HAProxy Enterprise with HAProxy Fusion Control Plane, without disrupting our users or changing our workflows. Leveraging 1100+ existing structured load balancer configuration manifests, we achieved a declarative, platform-independent, and fully automated migration.

What you'll learn:

• How we used Ansible and Jenkins to automate the entire migration process
• Ways to preserve your existing deployment pipeline during major infrastructure changes
• The flexible architecture of HAProxy One that makes automation much easier
• Simple cutover techniques using DNS CNAME records for zero-downtime migration
• Building a university-wide LBaaS that works across multiple datacenter

A principal goal of the project was to avoid making changes to the existing deployment pipeline and the established load balancer declaration syntax, providing a seamless migration experience and minimizing the need for training and process retrofit.