HAProxyConf 2025 concluded yesterday, successfully completing two days of groundbreaking announcements, insightful customer presentations, and vibrant community engagement. Day One was built around HAProxy One's advances as a modern security platform; Day Two featured the announcement of the HAProxy Unified Kubernetes Gateway, which will provide flexible, Kubernetes-native traffic management using both the Ingress API and the newer Gateway API.
The conference brought together hundreds of passionate users, customers, and developers at the Mission Bar Conference Center in San Francisco in an outstanding demonstration of open source community spirit.
In a morning session titled “Evolving Kubernetes networking: HAProxy's journey with Ingress, Gateway API, and HAProxy Fusion," HAProxy Technologies engineers Zlatko Bratkovic, Hélène Durand, and Dario Tranchitella unveiled the company’s newest product for Kubernetes users.
The HAProxy Unified Kubernetes Gateway will be available as a standalone open source product, designed for single Kubernetes clusters and Gateway classes; it will also be incorporated directly into HAProxy Fusion (the centralized control plane of HAProxy One), which will enable use with multiple Kubernetes clusters and multiple Gateway classes, as well as providing all the benefits of HAProxy Fusion for scalable management, monitoring, and automation.
HAProxy Fusion also includes Kubernetes service discovery and automation of HAProxy Enterprise’s load balancing capabilities, which can enable external load balancing, multi-cluster routing, and direct-to-pod load balancing – either on-premises or in the cloud. With the HAProxy Unified Kubernetes Gateway incorporated into HAProxy Fusion, customers will have the flexibility to manage Kubernetes traffic using Kubernetes-native methods, HAProxy-native methods, or a combination of both – accommodating the widest possible range of deployment scenarios and platform user expertise.
HAProxy One is the world’s fastest application delivery and security platform, from the company behind HAProxy. The platform consists of a flexible data plane (HAProxy Enterprise), a scalable control plane (HAProxy Fusion), and a secure edge network (HAProxy Edge), which together enable multi-cloud load balancing as a service (LBaaS), web app and API protection, API/AI gateways, Kubernetes networking, application delivery network (ADN), and end-to-end observability.
In one of the highlights of Day Two, Srivignessh Pacham, Sr Software Engineer at PayPal, showed how the company uses HAProxy One to manage traffic to tens of thousands of dynamic Kubernetes backends. HAProxy Fusion’s Kubernetes integration provides PayPal near-instantaneous service discovery – allowing them to manage 60,000 services per HAProxy Fusion cluster, and automate one thousand configuration updates per minute across their fleet of HAProxy Enterprise nodes.
PayPal’s presentation showed how the HAProxy One platform makes it simple to manage large-scale Kubernetes traffic in complex and highly dynamic applications, with rich analytics for every request in HAProxy Fusion’s modern UI.
Willy Tarreau, CTO and Lead Developer, HAProxy Technologies
HAProxy is defined as much by the people in our community as by the technology. We built HAProxy with performance, efficiency, reliability, flexibility, and longevity in mind, and the community lives out those values. We’ve been growing for nearly 25 years, always adapting to whatever comes. These are people you can count on to always excel in what they do.
Zlatko Bratkovic, Development Team Lead, HAProxy Technologies
HAProxy is a key component in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation landscape, and with the HAProxy Unified Kubernetes Gateway users will have even more flexibility in how they route external traffic into Kubernetes applications. This is great news for open source users, who will be able to use the latest Kubernetes standards in a product built on HAProxy’s legendary performance and reliability. And for our enterprise customers, HAProxy Fusion will provide even richer capability.
