Fabio is an HTTP and TCP reverse proxy that configures itself with data from Consul.

Traditional load balancers and reverse proxies need to be configured with a config file. The configuration contains the hostnames and paths the proxy is forwarding to upstream services. This process can be automated with tools like consul-template that generate config files and trigger a reload.

Fabio works differently since it updates its routing table directly from the data stored in Consul as soon as there is a change and without restart or reloading.

When you register a service in Consul all you need to add is a tag that announces the paths the upstream service accepts, e.g. urlprefix-/user or urlprefix-/order and fabio will do the rest.

Apache APISIX is a dynamic, real-time, high-performance API gateway.

APISIX provides rich traffic management features such as load balancing, dynamic upstream, canary release, circuit breaking, authentication, observability, and more.

You can use Apache APISIX to handle traditional north-south traffic, as well as east-west traffic between services. It can also be used as a k8s ingress controller.

MetalLB is a load-balancer implementation for bare metal Kubernetes clusters, using standard routing protocols.

Why?

Kubernetes does not offer an implementation of network load-balancers (Services of type LoadBalancer) for bare metal clusters. The implementations of Network LB that Kubernetes does ship with are all glue code that calls out to various IaaS platforms (GCP, AWS, Azure…). If you’re not running on a supported IaaS platform (GCP, AWS, Azure…), LoadBalancers will remain in the “pending” state indefinitely when created.

Bare metal cluster operators are left with two lesser tools to bring user traffic into their clusters, “NodePort” and “externalIPs” services. Both of these options have significant downsides for production use, which makes bare metal clusters second class citizens in the Kubernetes ecosystem.

MetalLB aims to redress this imbalance by offering a Network LB implementation that integrates with standard network equipment, so that external services on bare metal clusters also “just work” as much as possible.

Katran is a C++ library and BPF program to build high-performance layer 4 load balancing forwarding plane. Katran leverages XDP infrastructure from the kernel to provide an in-kernel facility for fast packet's processing.
Katran's key features:

1) Blazing fast (especially w/ XDP in driver mode).
2) Performance scaling linearly with a number of NIC's RX queues.
3) RSS friendly encapsulation.

hey is a tiny program that sends some load to a web application.

hey was originally called boom and was influenced from Tarek Ziade's tool at tarekziade/boom. Using the same name was a mistake as it resulted in cases where binary name conflicts created confusion. To preserve the name for its original owner, we renamed this project to hey.

Envoy is an L7 proxy and communication bus designed for large modern service oriented architectures. The project was born out of the belief that:

The network should be transparent to applications. When network and application problems do occur it should be easy to determine the source of the problem.

In this post I will explain how to transfer a multi terabyte size database between two MySQL instances using mydumper, which is a logical backup and restore tool that works in parallel. I will also cover the case where you need to transfer only a subset of data.

Big tables are often problematic because of the amount of time needed to do mysqldump/restore which is single threaded. It is not uncommon for this type of process to take several days.

Siege is an http load testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to let web developers measure their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet. Siege supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols. It lets its user hit a server with a configurable number of simulated clients. Those clients place the server “under siege.”

Once a packet arrives as a particular CloudFlare data center we want to ensure it gets to a server that can correctly handle the request. There are four key tasks that CloudFlare's servers perform: DNS, proxy, cache, and logging. We tend to follow the Google-like approach and deploy generic, white-box servers that can perform a number of different functions. (Incidentally, if anyone is interested, we're thinking of doing a blog post to "tour" a typical CloudFlare server and discuss the choices we made in working with manufacturers to design them.) Since servers can fail or be overloaded, we need to be able to route traffic intelligently around problems. For that, we return to our old friend Anycast.

The Pound program is a reverse proxy, load balancer and HTTPS front-end for Web server(s). Pound was developed to enable distributing the load among several Web-servers and to allow for a convenient SSL wrapper for those Web servers that do not offer it natively. Pound is distributed under the GPL - no warranty, it's free to use, copy and give away.
WHAT POUND IS:

a reverse-proxy: it passes requests from client browsers to one or more back-end servers.
a load balancer: it will distribute the requests from the client browsers among several back-end servers, while keeping session information.
an SSL wrapper: Pound will decrypt HTTPS requests from client browsers and pass them as plain HTTP to the back-end servers.
an HTTP/HTTPS sanitizer: Pound will verify requests for correctness and accept only well-formed ones.
a fail over-server: should a back-end server fail, Pound will take note of the fact and stop passing requests to it until it recovers.
a request redirector: requests may be distributed among servers according to the requested URL.

Pound is a very small program, easily audited for security problems. It can run as setuid/setgid and/or in a chroot jail. Pound does not access the hard-disk at all (except for reading the certificate file on start, if required) and should thus pose no security threat to any machine.