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."It solves a problem for me where I can build files, not based on the health of the check, but rather the speed of the check."
"I estimate that this product has saved our company hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in possible downtime from previous load balancers. We make a lot of our money from online sales, so it is critical to have 99.9% uptime."
"It is stable. Period. Will not fail unless you do something wrong."
"The solution is effective in managing our traffic."
"I can't speak to all of the HAProxy features because we don't use them all, but load balancing is very good."
"The most valuable feature of HAProxy is that its open source."
"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."
"We were able to use HAProxy for round robin with our databases, or for a centralized TCP connection in one host."
"Istio's best feature is that it's easy to use."
"Istio can save you time in terms of network troubleshooting."
"We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic."
"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."
"The most valuable features of Istio are the traffic management and the Sidecar they inject, which greatly helps secure the application."
"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."
"They should introduce one feature that I know many people, including me, are waiting for: HAProxy should have provide hot-swipe for back-end servers. Also, they need a more detailed GUI for monitoring and configuration."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing model. It could be cheaper."
"Sometimes it's challenging to get through the log, and you need a log to understand what is going on. It isn't easy to map the logging with the documentation, and every time I read the log, I have to pull out the documentation to understand what I'm reading."
"There is room for improvement in HAProxy's dynamic configuration."
"The visibility could be improved."
"Pricing, monitoring, and reports can be improved."
"We need to handle new connections by dropping, or queuing them while the HAProxy restarts, and because HAProxy does not handle split config files."
"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."
"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."
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, VMware Tanzu Service Mesh, AWS App Mesh and Envoy. See our HAProxy vs. Istio report.
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