HAProxy Administration Training Course

1. Fundamental overview of load balancing and balancers

2. Getting to know HAProxy

1. Defining the scope: what HAProxy does and does not handle
2. Operational mechanics of HAProxy
3. Core functionalities
   1. Proxy operations
   2. SSL implementation
   3. System monitoring
   4. Ensuring high availability
   5. Traffic distribution
   6. Session stickiness
   7. Data sampling and transformation
   8. Mapping techniques
   9. ACLs and conditional logic
   10. Content-based switching
   11. Stick-tables usage
   12. Formatted string handling
   13. HTTP rewriting and redirects
   14. Server safeguarding measures
   15. Logging capabilities
   16. Statistical data
4. Advanced capabilities
   1. Management tools
   2. System-specific features
   3. Scripting integration
5. Capacity planning and sizing
6. Obtaining and installing HAProxy

3. Alternatives to HAProxy

1. a. Nginx
2. b. Apache and other solutions

4. Refresher on HTTP protocols

• Understanding the HTTP transaction lifecycle
• Structure of HTTP requests
• Anatomy of the request line
• Interpretation of request headers
• Composition of HTTP responses
• Details of the response line
• Analysis of response headers

5. Configuring HAProxy

1. Understanding the configuration file syntax
2. Handling quotes and escape characters
3. Utilizing environment variables
4. Time formatting conventions
5. Practical configuration examples

6. Global settings

1. Process control and security parameters
2. Optimizing performance
3. Debugging strategies
4. User list definitions
5. Peer configurations
6. Mailer settings

7. Proxy definitions

1. Overview of proxy keyword directives
2. Reference for keywords arranged alphabetically

8. Bind and server directives

1. Options for bind statements
2. Server and default-server configuration options
3. DNS resolution for servers
4. Broad perspective on these settings
5. Defining the resolvers section

9. Modifying HTTP headers

10. Implementing ACLs and sample extraction

1. Fundamentals of ACLs
2. Matching boolean values
3. Matching integer data
4. Matching string patterns
5. Applying regular expressions (regex)
6. Matching variable data blocks
7. Matching IPv4 and IPv6 addresses
8. Constructing conditions using ACLs
9. Extracting sample data
10. Applying converters
11. Fetching samples from internal states
12. Fetching samples at Layer 4
13. Fetching samples at Layer 5
14. Fetching samples from buffer contents (Layer 6)
15. Fetching HTTP samples (Layer 7)
16. Using built-in ACLs

11. Logging configuration

1. Setting log severity levels
2. Defining log formats
3. Standard log format
4. TCP-specific log format
5. HTTP-specific log format
6. Creating custom log formats
7. Error logging format
8. Advanced logging parameters
9. Suppressing logs for external tests
10. Logging prior to session termination
11. Elevating log levels during errors
12. Disabling logs for successful connections
13. Tracking timing events
14. Capturing session state at disconnect
15. Handling non-printable characters
16. Capturing HTTP cookies
17. Capturing HTTP headers
18. Illustrative log examples

12. Supported filters

1. Trace filtering
2. HTTP compression
3. Stream Processing Offload Engine (SPOE)
4. Caching mechanisms
5. Limitations b. Setup Cache section
6. Proxy section details