HAProxy Technologies has announced the 20th anniversary of the HAProxy load balancer. This week, the HAProxy community will be celebrating this milestone at the virtual HAProxyConf by presenting individual experiences in deploying the HAProxy load balancer to power modern application delivery with the utmost performance, observability and security.

“I’m very proud of all the people who have come together over the years to make HAProxy the most widely used load balancer in the world,” said Willy Tarreau, CTO, product lead, HAProxy Technologies. “I couldn’t have done a tenth of what we’ve reached without this helpful community, and I would never have imagined that I could have teamed up with plenty of people I didn’t know to deliver something better.”

HAProxy’s design provides extensive support for modern architectures, including microservices, and for all types of deployment environments, from bare metal servers to VMs and containers.

HAProxy was originally written by Willy Tarreau, an early contributor to the Linux kernel, who still maintains the project. Introduced in 2001 as a free, very fast and reliable solution for offloading traffic from traditional, hardware load balancers, HAProxy quickly grew to offer high availability, security, and logging for TCP and HTTP-based applications, and remained modern by continually adopting new standards as they emerged, such as HTTP/2 and QUIC.