gobetween is a modern and minimalistic L4 load balancer and reverse proxy for the cloud era.
It aims to provide fast, flexible and full-featured load balancing solution for modern microservice architectures.
gobetween is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Fast L4 Load Balancing
- TCP – with optional The PROXY Protocol support.
- TLS – TLS Termination + ACME & TLS Proxy.
- UDP – with optional virtual sessions and transparent mode.
- Clear & Flexible Configuration with TOML or JSON:
- File – read configuration from the file.
- URL – query URL by HTTP and get configuration from the response body.
- Consul – query Consul key-value storage API for configuration.
- Management REST API:
- System Information – general server info.
- Configuration – dump current config.
- Servers – list, create & delete.
- Stats & Metrics – for servers and backends including rx/tx, status, active connections & etc.
- Discovery
- Static – hardcode backends list in the config file.
- Docker – query backends from Docker / Swarm API filtered by label.
- Exec – execute an arbitrary program and get backends from its stdout.
- JSON – query arbitrary http url and pick backends from response json (of any structure).
- Plaintext – query arbitrary http and parse backends from response text with customized regexp.
- SRV – query DNS server and get backends from SRV records.
- Consul – query Consul Services API for backends.
- LXD – query backends from LXD.
- Healthchecks:
- Ping – simple TCP ping healthcheck.
- Exec – execute arbitrary program passing host & port as options, and read healthcheck status from the stdout.
- Probe – send specific bytes to backend (udp, tcp or tls) and expect a correct answer (bytes or regexp).
- Balancing Strategies (with SNI support):
- Weight – select backend from pool based relative weights of backends.
- Roundrobin – simple elect backend from pool in circular order.
- Iphash – route client to the same backend based on client ip hash.
- Iphash1 – same as iphash but backend removal consistent (clients remain connecting to the same backend, even if some other backends down).
- Leastconn – select backend with least active connections.
- Leastbandwidth – backends with least bandwidth.
- Integrates seamlessly with Docker and with any custom system (thanks to Exec discovery and healthchecks).
- Single binary distribution.
Website: gobetween.io
Support: Documentation, GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Ievgen Ponomarenko and contributors
License: Open source
gobetween is written in Go. Learn Go with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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| GLB Director | Set of stateless L4 load balancer servers |
| Balance | Generic TCP proxy with round robin load balancing and failover capabilities |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |