Last week, the cloud-native jamboree that is KubeCon descended on London, UK (my home city), and HAProxy Technologies set out to be the life of the party. This year’s event was our biggest yet, so we brought our A-game – with a huge booth, a lot to show off, and thousands and thousands of T-shirts to fold and give away. Amid the coffees, tech demos, old friends, coffees, raffles, keynotes, coffees, getting lost in the cavernous exhibition center, and — sorry, I’m still a bit jittery — there were a few key takeaways for HAProxy and our users.
The giga-booth and the power of Loady
HAProxy Technologies has been at KubeCon before, but never like this. Last year, we couldn’t keep up with the number of people who wanted to visit our booth and talk to us about how to achieve high performance, security, and simplicity with Kubernetes traffic management. So this year, we knew we had to go big. The new giga-booth supported four demo stations and a small demo theatre inside. We even had a built-in store room to hold the thousands and thousands of T-shirts.
HAProxy's mascot, Loady the load-balancing elephant
As our enterprise customers will attest, we do like to go above and beyond, and when it comes to tradeshow giveaways, it’s hard to beat our loveable mascot Loady. Our plucky elephant hero came in soft plushy form and emblazoned on kids’ T-shirts and baby vests. These family-friendly giveaways, in addition to our cool adult-sized items, were the bright idea of Ajna Borogovac, COO of HAProxy Technologies, and reflect our belief that balance is important in all things – not just in your application traffic. As the saying goes, “Give a man a HAProxy T-shirt, and he’ll wear it for a day. Give him a Loady for his child, and he’ll enjoy high availability for a lifetime.”
To tie it all together, we chose the first day of the event to launch our new website at www.haproxy.com, which embraces a dark theme to match our booth at KubeCon. Check it out — it’s easy on the eyes.
We had a lot to say
The big booth also gave us the space to showcase the many sides of HAProxy Technologies, demonstrating once and for all that there’s more to HAProxy than load balancing. HAProxy One, the world's fastest application delivery and security platform, seamlessly blends data plane, control plane, and edge network to deliver the world's most demanding applications, APIs, and Al services in any environment.
HAProxy One includes:
HAProxy Enterprise: a flexible data plane layer that provides high-performance load balancing, high availability, an API/AI gateway, Kubernetes application routing, SSL processing, DDoS protection, bot management, global rate limiting, and a next-generation WAF.
HAProxy Fusion: a scalable control plane that provides full-lifecycle management, monitoring, and automation of multi-cluster, multi-cloud, and multi-team HAProxy Enterprise deployments, with infrastructure integration for AWS, Kubernetes, Consul, and Prometheus.
HAProxy Edge: a globally distributed application delivery network that provides fully managed application delivery and security services, a secure partition between external traffic and origin networks, and threat intelligence enhanced by machine learning that powers the next-generation security layers in HAProxy Fusion and HAProxy Enterprise.
Our experts showed how to use HAProxy One to simplify Kubernetes with service discovery in the control plane, protect AI backends with an AI gateway, and deploy multi-layered security with a unified platform that simplifies management, observability, and automation.
Beyond the booth, our own Jakub Suchy, Director of Solutions Engineering, popped up several times throughout the event to share perspectives on AI and show how to do some novel things with HAProxy. Jakub’s sessions included:
A keynote session on “Lessons Learned in LLM Prompt Security”.
A demo theatre session titled “Beyond Basic Routing: Building an AI-Aware HAProxy Gateway for LLM Security”.
A roundtable discussion on “AI and Cloud Native”.
On top of all that, we also announced that HAProxy Technologies became a Gold Member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Willy Tarreau, CTO of HAProxy Technologies, commented: “With our CNCF Gold Membership, we are committed to enabling a scalable and resilient cloud-native ecosystem for our users and other open source enthusiasts.”
And we heard a lot from you
Of course, one of the best things about an event like KubeCon is the chance to meet enthusiastic HAProxy users, those returning to HAProxy after trying something else, and the lucky few who are discovering HAProxy for the first time. It was a pleasure and an inspiration to hear all the ways HAProxy has helped solve problems (and, in many cases, avoid problems).
We also heard about the many new problems attendees are trying to solve today, from reducing the cost of WAF security in the cloud to simplifying the management of load balancer clusters and routing prompts to multiple LLM backends. We had fun showing how HAProxy One can address these challenges and more.
In all cases, offering our guests one of the thousands and thousands of HAProxy T-shirts to take away was a delight.
Takeaways from KubeCon London 2025
The first and most obvious takeaway is that HAProxy Technologies is executing on a different level, even compared with previous years. Attendees, sponsors, and exhibitors were stunned by the scale of our presence on the tradeshow floor and the breadth and depth of our solutions — enabled by the HAProxy One platform. All this is possible thanks to the success of our customers, the long-term health of our open-source community, and the incredible technical minds behind our unique technology.
The second takeaway is that no one is dismissing AI as a passing trend or a technology searching for a use case. Many of those we spoke to are deploying AI and LLMs in production or extensive experiments and are looking for ways to manage traffic, route prompts, maintain security, and optimize costs. The opportunity is real, as is the need for trusted solutions.
The third and final takeaway is what this means for our position in the cloud-native and application delivery landscape. HAProxy Technologies is many things: we are open source and enterprise; we are on-prem and in the cloud; we have self-managed and SaaS options. And across all that, we consistently prioritize performance, resilience, and security. In light of this, one of the most perceptive questions I received was, “So, who is your competition now?”
On the one hand, with our broad array of solutions, we find ourselves venturing into many new markets where HAProxy One presents a compelling alternative to other cloud, SaaS, and CDN solutions. On the other hand, with our authoritative expertise in data plane, control plane, security, and edge networking — in any environment — one might say that our competition is, frankly, nowhere in sight.
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