We performed a comparison between HAProxy and Istio based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Service Mesh solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."HAProxy Enterprise Edition has been rock solid. We have essentially had no downtime caused by our load balancers in the last 10 months, because they’ve worked so well. Previously, our load balancers caused us multiple hours per year in downtime."
"We were able to use HAProxy for round robin with our databases, or for a centralized TCP connection in one host."
"I have found HAProxy very helpful in replicating production environment architecture in a development and testing environment."
"Reliability. HAProxy is the most reliable product I have ever used."
"It is stable. Period. Will not fail unless you do something wrong."
"We don't have a problem with the user interface. it's good."
"The ability to handle a sequence of front- and back-ends gives the user the opportunity to send traffic through different services."
"The VRRP redundancy is also a mission-critical feature that works seamlessly. I can bring down a server live with minimal downtime because of this."
"The load balancing, service application, and monitoring of the life of the service are valuable features. We use it for authentication of call services, load balancing the calls among the service providers on service instances, and monitoring the health of the services."
"Istio's best feature is that it's easy to use."
"The tool's mutual TLS stands out. It provides secure communication between services within the cluster. Additionally, Istio offers built-in telemetry and tracing with tools like Jaeger, which aids monitoring and troubleshooting."
"We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic."
"The most valuable features of Istio are the traffic management and the Sidecar they inject, which greatly helps secure the application."
"Istio can save you time in terms of network troubleshooting."
"We need to handle new connections by dropping, or queuing them while the HAProxy restarts, and because HAProxy does not handle split config files."
"Documentation could be improved."
"The reconfigurability in terms of the tooling could be improved and maybe an editor plugin can be added."
"While troubleshooting, we are having some difficulties. There are no issues when it is running; it is stable and very good; however, if there is a troubleshooting issue or an incident occurs, we will have issues because this is open-source."
"There is no standardized document available. So, any individual has to work from scratch to work it out. If some standard deployment details are available, it would be helpful for people while deploying it. There should be more documentation on the standard deployment."
"If nbproc = 2, you will have two processes of HAProxy running. However, the stats of HAProxy will not be aggregated, meaning you don't really know the collective status in a single point of view."
"We would like to see dynamic ACL and port update support. Our infrastructure relies on randomly allocated ports and this feature would allow us to update without restarting the process."
"We've changed solutions as it doesn't fit with our current needs."
"If you're a beginner in infrastructure management and networking, learning Istio might pose some challenges. However, if you have some knowledge of networking or service meshes, you should find it manageable. Istio's website offers documentation to guide you through learning."
"For our use case that we applied it to, there were graph queues and the calls that were coming in. There were the things that we couldn't apply at the time, but it kind of worked."
"It would be good if the solution had more community forums."
"If someone doesn't understand Kubernetes, they'll have issues working with Istio."
"Istio's documentation is basic and would benefit from more examples."
"Istio needs to be more mature and user-friendly."
HAProxy is ranked 2nd in Service Mesh with 41 reviews while Istio is ranked 1st in Service Mesh with 6 reviews. HAProxy is rated 8.2, while Istio is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of HAProxy writes "Useful for for small and quick load-balancing tasks". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Istio writes "Provides traffic management and its mutual TLS authentication helps control the access policies". HAProxy is most compared with Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, NGINX Plus, Kemp LoadMaster, Citrix NetScaler and Loadbalancer.org, whereas Istio is most compared with Kong Mesh, NGINX Service-Mesh, AWS App Mesh, VMware Tanzu Service Mesh and Envoy. See our HAProxy vs. Istio report.
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