The intent of these particular benchmarks is to show out-of-the-box configuration profiles without optimization, and outside of having a backend to another service, use the load balancers default configuration. HAProxy is another open source load balancing solution. nginx is the canonical modern web server. Cloud load balancers typically scale to provide consistent performance under load. At its peak, we see the average backend response time at 3.5 milliseconds. Ideanote. Compare Haproxy VS nginx and find out what's different, what people are saying, and what are their alternatives. 3. Lets look at the same data over HTTPS: Much like our HTTP test, performance starts to sharply decline after the 90th percentile, but the tail end of poor performance grows larger with HTTPSbetween our 75th and 90th percentile, our latency increases by 2.21 seconds! It has a nice stats page, it integrates with tools like Consul or etcd for your configuration and discovery needs. For this test, we will use a static configuration file, which looks like this: Traefik is a dynamic load balancer designed for ease of configuration, especially in dynamic environments. Check. Our cloud load balancer is the Amazon ALB, which is an HTTP (L7) cloud-based load balancer and reverse proxy. It doesnt bode well for feature incomplete and crippled half-solutions like NginX anymore. Over 8.5M IPs active worldwide. This model is very fast for handling I/O bound workloads such as network traffic, but typically limits parallelism across multiple CPUs. command: My impression so far, starting with a Nextcloud test install: Caddy: nextcloud config is weird, not sure I figured everything out already. Based on open-source spa-to-http tooling and Traefik. Traefik: I am under the impression everyone is using it for Docker only . Additionally, we will be performing this test across two categories. Also, each load balancer supports a different feature set that may be more important to your needs than latency or throughput, such as ease of dynamic configuration changes. But a different kind of change is in the air. Flexible targeting by country, region, city, and provider. Follow to join The Startups +8 million monthly readers & +760K followers. LVS > Traefik > Nginx > HAProxy. Either standalone or as a Kubernetes ingress controller, Traefik taps into your container configuration to expose what you want exposed and load balance what you need load balanced. "Somewhere" I read to stay away from Caddy for nextcloud without further explaination, but that post was 2 or 3 years old. For example, your applications may take advantage of HTTP/2, require sticky sessions, have different TLS certificate settings, or require features that another load balancer does not have. weight = 1. . Cookie Notice Disclaimer 1: This is a rant. It's also much easier to get it setup to support Docker swarm than haproxy. I won't go on describing traefik in more detail as it's just too massive, but you should definitely have a look at it if you need more than the base of basics. Here we will compare two well known HTTP proxies which allow to route HTTP requests accepted on one standard TCP port (80/443) to internal processes listening on arbitrary HTTP ports and running on same or different hosts. Running the test from within the AWS VPC will reduce Internet latency. I've searched a long time for the best reverse proxy for my Home Lab. This is not an exhaustive list of things we can test. As it is a single-purpose solution in that it only offers load-balancing capabilities, it is much more focused on that one aspect compared to Nginx. The server runs proxmox and at least the following services: Mail / Database (so far Virtualmin based). Its interesting that Envoys throughput was several times higher than others. HAProxy Enterprise is a powerful product tailored to the goals, requirements and infrastructure of modern enterprises. Nginx vs Traefik proxing performance (Higher is better) So considering requests per seconds we might conclude that Traefik is 15% slower then Nginx, at least in mentioned test. Below are a few benefits and drawbacks to using HAProxy. He follows rules of common sense. and our So from the 33/18 ratio we might conclude that Nginx causes almost 2 times more questions then Traefik. Compare Traefik VS nginx and see what are their differences. It supports automatic discovery of services, metrics, tracing, and has Lets Encrypt support out of the box. Assuming Google Trends line you already might guess that Nginx is absolute leader in "Used by" battle. nginx; Traefik; AWS Elastic Load Balancing; ZEVENET; iNetFusion; Seesaw; . Achieving the right balance of features, operator usability, and performance depends on the type of software youre running, how its architected, and what platform its running on. Compare HAProxy Enterprise vs. Istio vs. NGINX vs. Traefik in 2022 by cost, reviews, features, integrations, deployment, target market, support options, trial offers, training options, years in business, region, and more using the chart below. 2022 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. It is based on the Go Programming Language, which encapsulates concurrency and parallelism features into the runtime to use all available resources on the system. Here we have compared based on a few parameters. We can see that the backend response time starts off low and increases as we increase the concurrency level. Comparing popular Ingress Controllers for Kubernetes & laying out important considerations for choosing the right one for you, Even though Kubernetes was initially released in June 2014, you may be surprised to know that the Kubernetes Ingress API remains in beta as of Kubernetes v1.18. Haproxy Landing Page. Traefik Enterprise brings out of the box high availability and security features necessary for mission critical application workloads, and includes 24/7 support for organizations. I am setting a up new root server at my hoster to consolidate all the servers I have set up over time. Some, but not all, of these load balancers will perform L4, or TCP, load balancing, which is a simple pass-through of traffic and can be much faster. With Ambassador Edge Stack and Envoy Proxy, we see significantly better performance. So when you run software in Docker/Compose/K8S, Nginx brings you at least three extra steps. In contrast to NGINX and HAProxy, Envoy uses a more sophisticated threading model with worker threads. Then they created simple Nginx and Traefik configs which proxy to whoami, and benchmarked throughput using wrk command-line tool. However when you need to adjust it or debug next bottleneck without easily available metrics, you again waste more and more developer hours. Activating simple features with Traefik does not require multiple complex settings as it does with NGINX, and the configuration itself tends to be a lot quicker and more concise as well. 3. Software Engineer at NYDIG writing about cloud, DevOps/SRE, and crypto topics: https://yitaekhwang.com, Externalize Data and (Hive)Metadata to make the compute engine stateless, Leveraging the Different Types of Clouds for Development, Safe and sandboxed execution of native code, Mastering ISO 13485 certification as an agile medical start-up. Create text file Dockerfile in nginx folder: 4. nginx and Traefik are primarily classified as "Web Servers" and "Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy" tools respectively. It had the highest throughput in terms of requests per second. However, the performance profiles for HTTPS are much lower across the board. Both haproxy and nginx have competition from a different direction. Benefits: Provides a comprehensive list of 61 different metrics. It also already has internal analytics. This may be due to some intelligent load balancing or caching inside of Envoy as part of the defaults. To gather sufficient data for each point, we will issue 1,000,000 requests for each test. First, understanding a load balancers ability to handle concurrent load gives us an understanding of how the load balancer handles spikes in requests across multiple different sources, so we will test performance at three concurrency levels. HAProxy is also considered to be one of the highly scalable and secure software, whereas Nginx is termed as one of the fastest web servers available in the market. This model is very fast for handling I/O bound workloads such as network traffic, but typically limits parallelism across multiple CPUs. In March, 2017 nginx domination of the reverse proxy space went into decline. While requests at a concurrency level of 50 are still fast, they increase at the 99th percentile level for 250 concurrency, and dramatically starting at the 95th percentile for 500 concurrency. NGINX Plus vs Traefik NGINX Plus VISIT PROFILE Traefik VISIT PROFILE Pricing Starting from $ 2500 /Per-Year Pricing Model: Per User Free Trial Free Version SEE ALL PRICING Not provided by vendor View Pricing Guide with similar products Free Trial Free Version SEE ALL PRICING Best for 1000+ users NGINX is highly extensible and is the basis for servers such as OpenResty, which builds upon NGINX with Lua to create a powerful web server and framework. It has a lot of surprises even after couple years of usage and experience. Now, lets look at HTTPS: Envoy still remains in the lead by throughput with HTTPS. By the way, the next Traefik version (3.0) has mention in roadmap about improving performance by ~20%: When you configure Nginx it feels like it's architecture was designed in early days when developers were trying to save last CPU instruction absolutely for anything from Nginx restart to serving requests. Be sure to SSH into the client VM and run the test against the proxy_server VM from there. -, # To enable Dashboard on http (for a local demo only, don't do in production), "traefik.http.routers.dashboard.rule=Host(`trfk-dashboard.localhost`)", # You can also add fancy URL constraints here e.g. With our other load balancers restricted to their out-of-the-box configuration, this might not seem fair, but we are evaluating these load balancers on features as well as performance, so ALB is included as a comparison point. SOAX is a cleanest, regularly updated proxy pool available exclusively to you. Compare HAProxy Enterprise vs. NGINX vs. Traefik using this comparison chart. Both HAProxy and Nginx are highly advantageous and offer a wide range of features. I can see why. As an API Gateway, Traefik Enterprise provides key capabilities such as API security, traffic management, and observability. Kong is a particularly appealing one, though suffering from the same crippling strategy like Nginx (well, it is built on top of it), but we shouldnt forget Caddy or Zuul speaking of which heres a comparison of popularity. Defaults to the AWS "US-East-2 (Ohio)" region. Deployed at the edge of your infrastructure, the API Gateway is a single entry point that routes client API requests to your backend microservices. In reality we don't code web apps on assembler because it is fast. Setting up Nginx We are going to run Nginx from docker as well and set up the configuration so we can access whoami from http://localhost/whoami. Traefik provides a ready to go system for serving production traffic with these additions. Here, you can see the round trip times from our load balancer to our backend. Simple whoami web server proxied over Traefik, Nginx vs Traefik proxing performance (Higher is better), Traefik 3.0 release promises to improve performance by ~20%, URL monitoring made easy: self-hosted open-source tool for checking your website availability, Learn website monitoring best practices. When you use Traefik you feel that it's creators give a first priority on users, and not on CPU loops. Next, we will look at our requests per second. This makes sense because we are loading the backend more heavily so it should take longer to respond. Traefik; lighttpd; Azure Traffic Manager; A high performance free open source web server powering busiest sites on the Internet. I have a hard time deciding which route to go. While often less of a concern than these other factors, its still important to understand the performance profiles of these load balancers under different types of load. Traefik: I am under the impression everyone is using it for Docker only. More load balancing options? Our configuration for NGINX looks like this: It has dashboard which helps you analyze traffic and what is happening. Get smarter at building your thing. However, using average search popularity in Google trends we can roughly calculate that Nginx is 18x times more popular then Traefik for period of last 5 years, where both tools already were on the market. While Envoy is also higher at other concurrency levels, the magnitude of the difference is especially high at the 250 concurrency level. This could mean several things, but at the core, it appears that load balancers perform worse under high bursts of traffic and take longer to respond to requests, affecting overall performance. However, this doesnt tell the whole story. Traefik: HTTP reverse proxy with commercial support from Containous In terms of popularity, nginx and HAProxy kept its lead in 2019 with Envoy overtaking F5 for the third spot according to. Haproxy vs nginx vs traefik from soax.com! I am not trying to say that Nginx is unstable: when you finished and debugged your config it works like a clock. traefik is obviously slower than nginx, but not so much: traefik can serve 28392 requests/sec and nginx 33591 requests/sec which gives a ratio of 85% nginx-proxy another consideration is minimizing server reloads because that impacts load balancing quality and existing connections etc defaultentrypoints = ["http", "https"] copy chulkilee opened This is an arbitrary number with the intent of helping ensure that there are enough requests to run to get meaningful data at higher concurrency levels. nginx Landing Page. When choosing a load balancer to front your applications traffic, there are several factors to consider. nginx has far more overall features than Envoy as an edge reverse proxy, though many modern service oriented architectures don't typically make use of them. Envoy came out as the overall winner in this benchmark. Traefik Enterprise enables security policies, adding user authentication . I like NginX. Haproxy Landing Page. Theres no extensive research beyond Google and StackOverflow and ServerFault plus my own experience. Create a folder nginx to store Dockerfile. To enable it in Traefik instantiated with docker compose you should just add a couple of lines: Now it is available onhttp://trfk-dashboard.localhost:8080/: Authors of Traefik already performed pretty good benchmarkwhere they just route requests to whoami webserver and measure how many request could be handled within period of time. Traefik . Traefik can't do it and it is pretty reasonable: static serving should not be HTTP proxy task by definition. Finally, as a basis of comparison, we will include one cloud-based load balancer: Amazon ALB. The system under test - HAProxy or NGINX - acted as a reverse proxy, establishing encrypted connections with the clients simulated by wrk threads, forwarding requests to a backend web server running NGINX Plus R22, and returning the response generated by the web server (a file) to the client. Setup your own URL monitor in a minutes using HotHost: a fast-to-setup and lightweight alternative to Nagios, Zabix and other website monitoring tools with a built-in free notifications to Slack, Telegram or Email, Deploy React/Vue/Angular in Docker simply and efficiently using Spa-to-http and Traefik. Ideanote is the #1 rated Idea Management solution for companies of all sizes. Traefik is young and ambitions David: it allows you to write and maintain routing quickly and deftly: the config file is predictable, understandable and flexible. In this article, we will test five different popular load balancers: NGINX, HAProxy, Envoy, Traefik, and Amazon Application Load Balancer (ALB). We will discuss some. Though Traefik is not statics server, the special dedicated tools like spa-to-httpwhich work out of the box without configuration files and have obvious "couple-of-lines" way to setup play with Traefik natively. First, we will look at concurrency as compared to tail latency for both the HTTP and HTTPS protocol. HAProxy has the best performance for HTTP and is tied with Envoy for HTTPS. We will use a simple load generator, Hey, to generate some sample traffic for these applications to access a simple backend service. User Level CPU - NGINX Inc and HAProxy were neck-and-neck with just under 50 percent. That said, I do have a lot of respect for nginx and their team, it's just that it's important to keep in mind that while haproxy is primarily a load balancer, nginx is primarily a web server (even an application server), and that even if there is some overlap between the two, it's quite common to find them together for a reason! It is used by some of the highest traffic applications on the Internet to power their edge and internal load balancing. Nowadays it is still a little bit faster then Traefik, but the price of this speed is pretty high: Nginx config looks complex and less maintainable. By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. After all NginX is trying to sell its Nginx+ product. It came like a breath of fresh air during my PHP heydays to stave off the Apache juggernaut that was crapping all over my beloved webapps. and synchronizes information about running services (containers). There are many other load balancers, so remember to evaluate the features you need and analyze performance based on your environment. From a response time perspective, HAProxy and Envoy both perform more consistently under load than any other option. The SolarWinds trademarks, service marks, and logos are the exclusive property of SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC or its affiliates. We provide manually verified B2B prospect lists with personalized first lines starting at $1 per lead. For all instances they used 8-core, 32 GB RAM instances with SSD. You can find a working example on my GitHub page alexhyett/traefik-vs-nginx-docker. Compare HAProxy Enterprise vs. NGINX vs. Traefik vs. ZEVENET in 2022 by cost, reviews, features, integrations, deployment, target market, support options, trial offers, training options, years in business, region, and more using the chart below. This enables it to run in a single process but still achieve parallelism using every CPU available to it. Traefik is a rather young project squarely aimed at those running their applications in orchestrated containers. Privacy Policy. Also, haproxy supports the "PROXY" protocol, allowing you to pass real client IP to backend services. So you can put your bundled SPA into some folder and say: hey Nginx, please serve it from here. If so, Envoy deserves the attention its getting in the Ops community. In a real-world production system, many things can alter your services performance. Such flat thinking model most likely caused by emotional flashbacks related to slowness issues caused by wrong architecture design and wrong data structures. I like to rant. Rate limiting per backend node? We are testing five different load balancers, chosen in part for their current and historical popularity, feature set, and use in real-world environments. 2 snowsnoot 10 mo. Now that we have a well-defined methodology, lets go over the load balancers we will be testing. Additionally, in case we want to perform more inspections after the fact, we will be sending traffic logs for these tests to SolarWinds Logglyour log management tool. Our configuration for NGINX looks like this: Here we are using a log format that also shows the request time and our upstream servers response time. To understand the performance profiles of these applications, we need to put them under load. . While NGINX settings end up in huge config maps that are hard to read and manage, it's not an issue with Traefik. So unless you are company which main business is HTTP proxying like Cloudflare, or large-scale corporation like Google, most likely your stakeholders will appreciate faster features delivery over couple of unnoticed milliseconds spent on linear proxying speed. This is a great deal of data to parse through, so we will look at a few trends across the data. NGINX uses an evented I/O model for serving traffic. DevOps NGINX claims to bea high-performance reverse proxy and load balancer. At the 95th and 90th percentile, our response profile starts to change a bit. Development, DevOps, Nginx, Python, Use cases, Troubleshooting and Diagnostics with Logs, View Application Performance Monitoring Info, Webinar Achieve Comprehensive Observability. Worth mentioning that Nginx has ability to serve static files directly from disk. So Nginx is two in one: HTTP proxy and HTTP files server. This provider is specific to Rancher 1.x. What's the difference between HAProxy Enterprise, NGINX, Traefik, and ZEVENET? "High-performance http server" is the top reason why over 1437 developers like nginx, while over 10 developers mention "Kubernetes integration" as the leading cause for choosing Traefik. Per backend stats? As nginx-proxy relies on simple virtual hostnames (FQDNs), traefik allows you to even proxy to different services depending on the URL path (e.g. It supports static configuration, API-based configuration, and service-discovery-based configuration. Testing HTTPS gives us an idea of the TLS termination performance for these different services. Most of what NginX+ offers, HAProxy has it. But a different kind of change is in the air. 2. This in and of itself will affect the performance of our system, but gives us valuable forensic data and would normally be turned on in a production environment. It has bridges also to many popular deployment platforms (docker, openshift, mezos, kubernetes, etc.) After all NginX is trying to sell its Nginx+, Why even look at NginX when theres HAProxy. To run the example just install latest version of docker to your system. Let's start with figures up to this date (second half of 2022): So Traefik was born 12 years later after Nginx but more then twice loved by GitHub community then Nginx. We are plotting an average of the HAProxy Tr field, which shows the average time in milliseconds spent waiting for the server to send a full HTTP response, not counting data. There are plenty of proxies/balancers in the proverbial sea and charging thousands for what others offer by default isnt good in the long term. Disclaimer 2: This is a personal opinion. If you want to ingress services like SMTP or MQTT, then this is a useful distinction. I do use docker-flow-proxy with haproxy for that and it works really well. HAProxy vs Nginx - Key Differences. ago Traefik & Nginx don't support non-HTTP TCP workloads, HAproxy does HAproxy is fast and lightweight Nginx is slow HAproxy all the way for me 3 ball83 4 mo. Openhttp://whoami.localhost/ in browser. As an aggregate, 90% of all requests complete within 855 milliseconds (ms). Create a text file app.confin nginx folder: 6. The raw data can be viewed on Google Sheets. You configure NGINX using a configuration file that can be hot-reloaded, but the NGINX Plus commercial offering enables the use of API-based configuration as well as other features designed for large, enterprise environments. I'd like to hear your thoughts / recommendations on the software mentioned above. Its a load balancer that goes hand in hand with service discovery methods and tools, reload-less reconfiguration, modern metrics and monitoring, all the goodies that are essential when behind a nice frontend may hide hundreds of small (should I say micro?) image: "traefik:v2.7" For example to serve Vue/React/Angular app in Docker stack through Traefik you have to set next container definition: These lines work in Docker compose however you can apply it to any format of Docker container description like Docker CLI or Kubernetes Pod definition. Now that youve seen some performance characteristics of various load balancers, its time to add your own log monitoring. Researchers relaxed related Linux limits to unleash maximum throughput. For more information, please see our it serves 25.03% of traffic of the top 1 million websites. Rancher 2.x requires Kubernetes and does not have a metadata endpoint of its own for Traefik to query. mydomain.com/service-1 ). At the same time if we will check Google trends we will find out that Nginx is much more popular tool: StackOverflow has 33x times more questions about Nginx then Traefik. Love podcasts or audiobooks? The NGINX business model creates an inherent tension between the open source and Plus product, and we weren't sure how this dynamic would play out if we contributed upstream. From developers point of interaction, proxy tool must give straightforward way to define a rules which would filter out traffic based on information from HTTP package kind of: Ability to have such flexible configs is first priority, but if you are reading this post you are interested in full side-by-side review, so let's do it! Collect, develop and manage more of the right ideas from customers and employees to drive your growth. Not the fastest of the bunch, Traefik takes to catering different needs. Second, we will test the performance of different protocols: HTTP and HTTPS. This is required whether you are using Nginx or Traefik for your reverse proxy. It would be nice to have if the reverse proxy can be managed through a web interface and is able to feed some stats to influx or promotheus. On the other hand, HAProxy offers all that for free. When using percentiles, tail latency is important because it shows the minority of requests that potentially have issues, even when the vast majority of requests are fast. We will spawn lightweightwhoami http serverwritten on Go as a compose service and also will add HTTP proxy which will take traffic coming on whoami.localhost domain and proxy it to actual server. Assuming risks in changing VUCA world, each successful product or feature deserves to appear on market as soon as possible, and when it will be overloaded with users and profits gained from them, then still the better strategy would be to scale servers horizontally first, instead of trying saving couple of loops on one machine by using unmodern hardly-maintainable tools designed for hardware of previous decades like Nginx. Compare price, features, and reviews of the software side-by-side to make the best choice for your business. HAProxy; NGINX; Traefik; IMPORTANT! Effective Log Management and Analysis as an Enabler for Observability, How We Monitor Elasticsearch With Metrics and Logs, SolarWinds THWACKcamp 2022: A Decade of Learning, Apache and Nginx log analysis: simple application monitoring and insight, New Log Types Supported: Rails, Nginx, AWS S3 and Logstash, Five Ways That qbeats Uses Loggly to Gain Immediate Insight from Python and Nginx Logging, Benchmarking 5 Popular Load Balancers: Nginx, HAProxy, Envoy, Traefik, and ALB. && (PathPrefix(`/api`) || PathPrefix(`/dashboard`)), # Optional, port used for traefik Dashboard and traefik API if you need it. While Amazon also has the Elastic Load Balancer and newer Network Load Balancer, the Application Load Balancer supports the L7 features needed to make the right comparison for this test, such as TLS termination. What's the difference between HAProxy Enterprise, Istio, NGINX, and Traefik? NGINX has slightly better performance than HAProxy, with latency spikes around 750ms (except for the first scale up operation). Each of the three components (client, reverse . Theres a whole other rant available with bonus comments on the same theme. At the far extremes of concurrency and latency, TLS has a serious performance effect upon our response times. Haproxy: I understand the concept but am under the impression that the configuration complexity goes way above my needs. Openhttp://whoami.localhost/in browser. HAProxy Enterprise combines HAProxy, the world's fastest and most widely used open source software load balancer and application delivery controller, with enterprise class features, services and premium support. So considering requests per seconds we might conclude that Traefik is 15% slower then Nginx, at least in mentioned test. Check out our AUTUMN PLANS until 30.09 and 15% promocode ATMN21 . Both haproxy and nginx have competition from a different direction.