Introduction
Choosing a reverse proxy for a containerized environment could be made easy by following a few guidelines to narrow down available options.
1. Understand Requirements Well
2. Evaluate Popular Options
3. Community and Popularity
4. POC and Validation
1. Understand Requirements Well
It is very important to choose the reverse proxy that matches your use case and expectations. Defining this would ensure that the reverse proxy would solve the purpose you intend to use, and any additional features / support the tool may offer becomes an added advantage. You could use some of the factors below to explain your requirements.
– Performance
– Security
– Load Balancing / Scalability
– Maintainability / Quick Deployments
– Monitoring Support
– Integrability
– Ease of Configuration
In addition, define any edge cases your infrastructure would need, and ensure the tool you select is capable of solving it.
2. Evaluate Popular Options
There are many options out there in the market, and some are proven already in a very specific environment you would like to use. There are benchmark reports on such, which detail all the pros and cons a specific tool has to offer. For simplicity, I summarize a few popular options below,
NGINX:
● What it is: A fast and reliable reverse proxy.
● Good for: General use, works well in most cases, especially if you have lots of traffic.
HAProxy:
● What it is: A powerful and efficient reverse proxy.
● Good for: Situations where you need high performance and reliability.
Traefik:
● What it is: A modern reverse proxy that’s easy to set up with containers.
● Good for: Automatically managing services that change a lot, like in Kubernetes or Docker.
Also, it may be possible that you already have an orchestration tool for managing your containerized application, hence evaluating compatibility with them could also be useful.
Popular examples are described below,
● Kubernetes: If you’re using Kubernetes, Traefik or NGINX are popular choices because
they work smoothly with it.
● Docker Swarm: Traefik is often preferred for Docker Swarm since it’s easy to configure.
● Advanced Microservices: If your setup is very advanced, Envoy Proxy might be the best option.
3. Community and Popularity
It is always great to use a tool, which has been battle-proven and has a great community to provide support. When it comes to a production environment, which requires higher availability, it’s better to rely on something widely accepted and known, rather than experimenting with a less popular tool out there.
Also, the optional availability of commercial support offered by the vendor/developer of the tool can be a great value addition, as this may come in handy in critical situations which require extensive and detailed support.
4. POC and Validation
Start the integration by making a proof of concept, which covers all requirements you had drafted in step 1, followed by evaluating if it’s doing the job well. It is important to test all aspects and features provided by the tool at this phase.
Eventually, the tool can be validated in a lower environment to ensure it works as expected in a near-production level environment. It could be useful to stress this environment to a reasonable level to anticipate the robustness of the tool in such stress.
5. Conclusion
Choose a reverse proxy that aligns best with your environment’s needs. If ease of use and dynamic service discovery are critical, you might prefer an option that is simple to configure and adapts well to changes. For high-performance, low-latency requirements, a reverse proxy known for speed and efficiency would be more suitable.
A chosen tool, in understanding your needs, has to be evaluated with a POC, validating in lower environments and also sizing up on the community size to maintain and improve with it in the future. Remember to also consider your team’s familiarity with the tool, as well as the long-term maintenance implications.
Author: Pragatheesh Kumar is a Team Leader and a Tech Lead at CMS, leading a team of Java Springboot, Angular, and .Net engineers for a leading EU organization providing electronic document management solutions.
