It is a load balancing tool. Load balancing consists of bringing together multiple components to achieve a total processing capacity over the individual capacity of each component, without end-user intervention and in a scalable manner. This causes more operations to be performed simultaneously for the time it takes for a component to perform only one. One of the most convenient and lightweight load balancers is HAProxy
It has the following advantages:
• Proxy both TCP (IPv4 & IPv6 sockets) HTTP (gateway) traffics and traffic flowing in both directions.
• Offload / initialize SSL connections to ensure a secure connection
• Normalize HTTP traffics to allow valid requests only
• Content-based switching allows the server to decide whether to fulfill the request.
• Balancing the server on different packets/requests
• Regulating traffic to impose speed limits
• IP, URL, etc. Protection against DDoS by keeping statistics
• Observation point for network troubleshooting using informative logs
• HTTP compression transfer
• Proxy caching to return repetitive and valid responses