gobetween - modern & minimalistic load balancer and reverse-proxy for the :cloud: Cloud era.

Current status: Maintenance mode, accepting PRs. Currently in use in several highly loaded production environments.

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 and MaxConnections 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

Architecture

Usage

• Install with snap: https://snapcraft.io/gobetween
• Other Installation Options
• Read Configuration Reference
• Execute gobetween --help for full help on all available commands and options.

Hacking

• Install Go 1.24+ https://golang.org/
• $ git clone git@github.com:yyyar/gobetween.git
• $ make
• $ make run

Debug and Test

Run several web servers for tests in different terminals:

• $ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000
• $ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8001

Instead of Python's internal HTTP module, you can also use a single binary (Go based) webserver like: https://github.com/udhos/gowebhello

gowebhello has support for SSL sertificates as well (HTTPS mode), in case you want to do quick demos of the TLS+SNI capabilities of gobetween.

Put localhost:8000 and localhost:8001 to static_list of static discovery in config file, then try it:

• $ gobetween -c gobetween.toml

• $ curl http://localhost:3000

Enable profiler and debug issues you encounter

[profiler]
enabled = true     # false | true
bind    = ":6060"  # "host:port"

Performance

It's Fast! See Performance Testing

The Name

It's a play on words: gobetween ("go between").

Also, it's written in Go, and it's a proxy so it's something that stays between 2 parties :smile:

License

MIT. See LICENSE file for more details.

Authors & Maintainers

• Yaroslav Pogrebnyak
• Nick Doikov
• Ievgen Ponomarenko
• Illarion Kovalchuk

All Contributors

• See AUTHORS

Community

• Join gobetween Telegram group here.

Logo

Logo by Max Demchenko