Comparing HAProxy Scheduling Algorithms During the DDoS Attacks

Web-services have become most common IT enablers today. Cyber attacks such as the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks pose availability concerns which may result into service outages and consequently financial and reputation losses. Load balancing software such as HAProxy (high availability proxy) is an important building block of the web service delivery today. Load balancing software provides incoming request distribution among web-servers and admission control which may even help with combating DDoS attacks. In this work, we study and explore the performance of different load distribution or scheduling strategies in the presence of DDoS attacks. With the help of attack experiments, we find that First, HDR, Source, and URI scheduling algorithms performs best for both static and Poisson arrivals.