F5 BIG-IP DNS vs. HAProxy Community Edition

It's well suited. Like I said, it provides us, it provides the clients and the business environments throughout an Internal Revenue Service. The network visibility needed for them to provide their application and the use of their applications throughout the Internal Revenue Service and the enterprise, as far as IRS.

Incentivized

It prevents a single server failure from being a downtime event by adding redundancy to every layer of your architecture. A load balancer facilitates redundancy for the backend layer (web/app servers), but for a true high availability setup, you need to have redundant load balancers as well. So it is well suited for all production related servers and less suited for individual servers that do not require redundancy.

Incentivized

• The easy of importing DNS records into the BIG-IP
• The ease of searching and locating records
• The speed of creating multiple records when you need to duplicate effort.
• The DNS dashboards to see requests and data points.

Incentivized

• Allow traffic to systems to be distributed evenly, providing high availability
• Allow restrictions to resources using OAuth tokens
• Allow load balancing of databases

Incentivized

• I'd like to see better reporting capabilities on the decision-making process for DNS resolutions. Currently there are plenty of log messages for that, but I'd like to see tighter integration into the GUI.
• It could be an improvement to better discriminate features intended for AA vs LDNS functionality within the GUI.

Incentivized

• My understanding is a lack of support for UDP traffic
• One mistake in the haproxy.cfg prevents the entire thing from starting rather than only affecting the part of the config file that may have a typo of some other syntax problem.

Incentivized

We use this heavily and it is one of the best products out there for this type of use case. We already have LTMs and to leverage GTM on top of that is just a piece of cake. Everything is so well integrated its amazing

Incentivized

I think the interface that you guys have, it is pretty user friendly. I personally find it easy to work with.

Incentivized

It is very easy to use. I was able to find a lot of documents for it on the internet. Very good community support. There are lots of examples available to try. We mostly use a command-line user interface to interact with it. The CLI is also super easy to use and very easy to interact with

Incentivized

We haven't used customer support. We mostly used the community version. We build a multi-node HAProxy cluster with HA to the proxy itself using opensource plugins available. With the support available on the internet and the documents available we don't need to use much customer support.

Incentivized

As I mentioned, the GSLB capability, being able to do intelligent DNS by having access to monitor specific endpoints associated to my current BIG-IP infrastructure, I believe that brings a huge value, then combine fast responses and security.

Incentivized

We chose HA Proxy because it is cheaper than a hardware balancer, it is an open-source solution with a large community behind it and with constant updates. It also allows custom scripts according to needs.HA Proxy is a solution used in many internet sites like GitHub, Reddit, Twitter, and Tuenti.

Incentivized

• Protection against security threats using DNS as a vector.
• Protection against security threats targeting DNS itself.
• Provide top user experience to application clients, by directing their requests to where they will be treated with the best performance.

Incentivized

• Significantly lower investment vs competitors. In the case of F5s we have Virtual Editions so we're paying for the hardware to run it on top of the several thousand dollar licenses that are required for each pair and we currently have a pair of F5s per client so there's a huge potential for cost savings there.
• Requires our network engineers to learn a new skill or our Systems engineers to take on the responsibility of managing the load balancers. It's not a huge difference either way, but it does impact the way we have done business in the past.

Incentivized