DEVOPSdigest

HAProxy Technologies announced the launch of HAProxy Enterprise 2.9.

HAProxy Enterprise 2.9 advances the security solution with next-generation WAF and bot management capabilities.

This release also extends HAProxy Enterprise’s legendary performance and flexibility to support real-time applications that use the UDP transport protocol that powers much of the modern web. Supported by industry-leading benchmark results, these landmark features offer customers a powerful solution to security, latency, and scale challenges.

“The application delivery market is poised for disruption, and we’re eager to play that role,” said Dujko Radovnikovic, CEO, HAProxy Technologies. “Too often, application teams are forced to compromise between security, performance, and simplicity. With the launch of HAProxy Enterprise 2.9, we’re delivering secure application delivery without compromise. This is the fastest, simplest, and most secure solution on the market.”

HAProxy Enterprise 2.9 simplifies application delivery, enhances security, and boosts scalability. Key features include a next-generation WAF, bot management, and UDP load balancing for time-sensitive applications.

- Web Application Firewall: A web application firewall is crucial for protecting applications from attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and remote file inclusion (RFI) that can cause downtime, data loss, fraud, and more.

The next-generation HAProxy Enterprise WAF powered by the unique Intelligent WAF Engine brings industry-leading efficacy and performance, helping customers protect their business and reputation, simplify security, and reduce the impact on application performance and user experience. The Intelligent WAF Engine is a single low-latency process based on the company’s unique data science, security analytics, and real-world datasets. It identifies security threats using a non-signature-based detection system capable of blocking emerging and zero-day threats without requiring users to create and manage long or complex lists of rules.

HAProxy Enterprise WAF protects application traffic, provides optional OWASP Core Rule Set compatibility, reduces false positives, and minimizes latency. In testing based on open source WAF benchmark data, it scores a balanced accuracy of 98.53% (compared to the industry average which is below 90%) with latency below measurable thresholds for the majority of attack payloads. The OWASP CRS compatibility mode provides an incredibly low false positive rate of 1.78% at paranoia level 2 (compared with 28.36% for the ModSecurity WAF at the same paranoia level).

- Bot Management: Organizations with websites and web applications must protect against the effects of malicious bots, which can include DDoS attacks, ad fraud, content scraping, vulnerability scanning, and API abuse.

The HAProxy Enterprise Bot Management Module brings fast, reliable, and flexible management of automated traffic. It empowers customers to protect their business and reduce the resource cost of serving requests from unwanted bots.

The HAProxy Enterprise Bot Management Module identifies bot traffic reliably and with low latency. Detection, processing, and enforcement are done locally on each HAProxy Enterprise instance, with no reliance on an external connection. This keeps customers’ data local and secure, enabling compliance with privacy and data protection regulations.

Flexible integration with HAProxy Enterprise's suite of other powerful security layers (including the next-generation HAProxy Enterprise WAF and Global Rate Limiting) allows customers to tailor their protection and enforcement options based on the context provided by the HAProxy Enterprise Bot Management Module and the other security signals available in HAProxy Enterprise.

- UDP Proxying and Load Balancing: UDP is a connectionless protocol used for time-sensitive applications such as DNS lookups, streaming video, playing online games, and transporting log data. Load balancing is critical to providing reliable and performant application delivery.

HAProxy Enterprise provides unified load balancing with support for a broad range of protocols. HAProxy Enterprise 2.9 extends HAProxy Enterprise’s performance and reliability to UDP applications (such as those using DNS, NTP, RADIUS, or Syslog).

The HAProxy Enterprise UDP Module provides best-in-class UDP performance, enabling customers to scale higher, eliminate performance bottlenecks, reduce resource utilization on servers and cloud compute, and decrease overall costs.

In a performance benchmark of Syslog throughput with a log line message size of 1,472 Bytes, a single instance of HAProxy Enterprise 2.9 processed 3.8 million Syslog messages per second (46Gb/s) – 4.6X faster than the nearest enterprise competitor. When sending Syslog messages to log servers with a bandwidth of 40Gb/s, HAProxy Enterprise 2.9 achieved a very high delivery rate of 99.2% – 4X more reliable message delivery than the nearest enterprise competitor. UDP does not perform error correction, so reliable message delivery is critical to providing high quality of service.

Existing customers can upgrade to HAProxy Enterprise 2.9 today.