The operator now supports HAProxy backend via the Dataplane API. There are sample CustomResource configs to use this backend at config/samples/lb_v1_externalloadbalancer-haproxy.yaml and config/samples/lb_v1_externalloadbalancer-haproxy-infra.yaml.
This directory has information about how to run HAProxy with the Dataplane API on Docker and also how to deploy it using Ansible to a Physical or Virtual machine.
The operator will configure the HAProxy instance to listen on the defined VIP from the CustomResource YAML so it's assumed that the host running HAProxy already have that IP address configured into it's own network interface(s) so HAProxy can bind it's Frontend to the defined VIP. If HAProxy is running on a container, it should expose the required ports in the host.
If using a dedicated HAProxy instance for your cluster, you can use "*" as the VIP field in the YAML file for your ExternalLoadBalancer instance. This will make HAProxy bind the port to all IPs of the host it's currently running.
To test the backend with an HAProxy running on a Docker container, use the provided configuration and docker-composer files from haproxy-compose directory.
To start, run docker-compose up -d, it will load the config files from the cfg directory and start the Dataplane API in port 5555.
Dataplane API will manage the cfg/haproxy.cfg file and update it dynamically. The container exposes port 80 at 8088 and 443 at 8083. Port 5555 is the API and port 1936 the statistics shown at http://<IP>:1936/stats. You can add/change how these ports are exposed by changing the haproxy-compose/docker-compose.yml file.
To reset the configuration, stop the container with docker-compose down and replace the cfg/haproxy.cfg file with the haproxy.cfg.tpl file with cp haproxy.cfg.tpl cfg/haproxy.cfg then, start the container again.
Soon an Ansible playbook will be provided to deploy HAProxy in High-Avaliability mode with Keepalived on multiple machines.