Webtide

Tag: haproxy

  • HTTP/2 with HAProxy and Jetty

    HTTP/2 is now the official RFC 7540, and it’s about time to deploy your website on HTTP/2, to get the numerous benefits that HTTP/2 brings.
    A very typical deployment is to have Apache (or Nginx) working as a reverse proxy to a Servlet Container such as Jetty or Tomcat.
    This configuration cannot be used for HTTP/2, because Apache does not support yet HTTP/2 (nor does Nginx).
    We want to propose an alternative deployment replacing Apache (or Nginx) with HAProxy, so that we can leverage Jetty’s 9.3.0 HTTP/2 support, and retain most if not all the features that Apache (or Nginx) were providing as reverse proxy.
    For those that don’t know HAProxy, it’s a very fast load balancer and proxy that powers quite a number of the world’s most visited sites, see here.
    What you will get is a very efficient TLS offloading (performed by HAProxy via OpenSSL), and Jetty HTTP/2 support, including HTTP/2 Push.
    The setup to make HAProxy + Jetty + HTTP/2 work is fairly simple, and documented in detail here.
    Don’t wait years to update your website to HTTP/2: whether you run a JEE web application, or a PHP application like WordPress, HAProxy and Jetty can speed up your website considerably, and many studies have shown that this results in more business.
    Browsers like Firefox and Chrome already support HTTP/2, so you will get more than half of the world potentially accessing your website with HTTP/2.
    Contact us if you want to know more about HTTP/2 and how we can help you to speed up your website.

  • Jetty, SPDY and HAProxy

    The SPDY protocol will be the next web revolution.
    The HTTP-bis working group has been rechartered to use SPDY as the basis for HTTP 2.0, so network and server vendors are starting to update their offerings to include SPDY support.
    Jetty has a long story of staying cutting edge when it is about web features and network protocols.

    • Jetty first implemented web continuations (2005) as a portable library, deployed them successfully for years to customers, until web continuations eventually become part of the Servlet 3.0 standard.
    • Jetty first supported the WebSocket protocol within the Servlet model (2009), deployed it successfully for years to customers, and now the WebSocket APIs are in the course of becoming a standard via JSR 356.

    Jetty is the first and today practically the only Java server that offers complete SPDY support, with advanced features that we demonstrated at JavaOne (watch the demo if you’re not convinced).
    If you have not switched to Jetty yet, you are missing the revolutions that are happening on the web, you are probably going to lose technical ground to your competitors, and lose money upgrading too late when it will cost (or already costs) you a lot more.
    Jetty is open source, released with friendly licenses, and with full commercial support in case you need our expertise about developer advice, training, tuning, configuring and using Jetty.
    While SPDY is now well supported by browsers and its support is increasing in servers, it is still lagging a bit behind in intermediaries such as load balancers, proxies and firewalls.
    To exploit the full power of SPDY, you want not only SPDY in the communication between the browser and the load balancer, but also between the load balancer and the servers.
    We are actively opening discussion channels with the providers of such products, and one of them is HAProxy. With the collaboration of Willy Tarreau, HAProxy mindmaster, we have recently been able to perform a full SPDY communication between a SPDY client (we tested latest Chrome, latest Firefox and Jetty’s Java SPDY client) through HAProxy to a Jetty SPDY server.
    This sets a new milestone in the adoption of the SPDY protocol because now large deployments can leverage the goodness of HAProxy as load balancer *and* leverage the goodness of SPDY as well as provided by Jetty SPDY servers.
    The HAProxy SPDY features are available in the latest development snapshots of HAProxy. A few details will probably be subject to changes (in particular the HAProxy configuration keywords), but SPDY support in HAProxy is there.
    The Jetty SPDY features are already available in Jetty 7, 8 and 9.
    If you are interested in knowing how you can use SPDY in your deployments, don’t hesitate to contact us. Most likely, you will be contacting us using the SPDY protocol from your browser to our server 🙂