HAProxy

HAProxy is a self‑hostable, open‑source reverse‑proxy that supports both TCP and HTTP traffic. It provides high‑availability routing, load balancing, and proxying capabilities, allowing multiple backend servers to be accessed through a single entry point. The software is designed for high‑performance environments, handling large volumes of requests while maintaining reliability and security out of the box.

The tool is aimed at developers and system administrators who need to distribute traffic across services, keep high‑traffic sites online, and enforce failover strategies without relying on external services. Its configuration supports a range of deployment scenarios, from simple round‑robin balancing to more complex health‑checking and session‑persistence rules.

HAProxy is released under the GPL‑2.0 license and has been maintained since 2002, with a stable release track and optional commercial support. It is available as source packages, Docker images for and pre‑built binaries for various Linux distributions.