Open-source Azure Front Door alternatives

NGINX, pronounced engine x, is a web server that also serves as a reverse proxy, load balancer, API gateway and content cache. The official open source repository is written in C and distributed under a simplified two-clause BSD license. Enterprise distributions, commercial support and training are sold separately by F5, Inc.

NGINX is installed software with binary packages for the major operating systems and Linux distributions, in stable and mainline versions, plus Windows executables and dynamic modules. Typical tasks covered by the project's introduction include installing SSL certificates and enabling TLS, load balancing, rate limiting and content caching. Topics on the repository list TCP, UDP and mail proxying, HTTP/2, HTTP/3 and QUIC. You can also build from source, and the full documentation includes a beginners guide, development guide and directive reference.

HAProxy is a free reverse proxy offering load balancing, high availability and proxying for applications that use TCP or HTTP. It sits in front of servers, spreads incoming traffic between them and keeps services reachable when individual backends fail.

Repository topics point to features such as HTTP/2, TLS 1.3, caching, FastCGI, IPv6, the PROXY protocol and DDoS mitigation. The documentation is split across several files, including an introduction, a configuration manual, a Lua reference, notes on the SPOE engine, network namespaces under Linux, a management guide, the peers protocol and a regression testing suite, plus a wiki. Load generation utilities are described in separate documents.

HAProxy is written in C, and the repository is the development branch mirrored from git.haproxy.org. The project explains its life cycle in a BRANCHES file so you can choose the right version, offers a Discourse forum, mailing list, Slack and IRC for help, and reserves the issue tracker for bugs and feature requests.