All this is BS. He was doing the same scam many other projects (even MicroStrategy) is doing - praying on users FOMO - as long as there are new users, old ones will profit. The main reason Terra project have to be killed was that it was the only project providing non-USD stable coins, which was a direct attack on USD dominance. So they made an example of him to discourage other projects going in this direction (non-USD stable coins).
NginX is very good WEB SERVER - so it shines in serving content - web pages, caching images etc. But in proxy mode, the load-balancing between backends is pretty basic.
HAProxy is born to be very good LOAD BALANCER - you can have different balancing algorithms, not only round-robin.
HAProxy have also TCP mode, so you can balance your MySQL backends, for example.
Also for me, personally, HAProxy stats rock.
We used haproxy to do close to zero downtime migration of our postgres servers (and other stuff) from one data centre to another recently when we moved out of our old data centre: Set up a slave in the new dc, set up haproxy with the slave as backup, point all the clients to haproxy. Shut down the master, and as soon as the master stopped responding, haproxy would shove clients to the slave in the new data centre instead. Then touch the trigger file to make the slave recover and switch to master mode.
It meant we were in read-only mode because requests where going to the slaves for about 2-3 seconds (and unlike MySQL Postgres does not allow writes to a slave until it's been promoted) before the slave started handling updates - other than that everything just chugged along.
Thanks for the explanation, it's very enlightening to someone (me) who's never used haproxy. For front-end load balancing, I've been using Varnish. Is HAProxy also better at http load balancing than Varnish as well as nginx, do you know?
It's not like this any more. That's why recently there are so many "software engineers" - you write your Ruby code, install and configure NginX, Passenger etc., even support a cluster of machines (LB, DB, Apps), maybe with a little help for Chef.
I just graduated from Uni (in Maths). I had a lot of engineering friends, who didn't mind the CS students going into "engineering" jobs. They got really annoyed with a "telephone engineer" installing their telephone line - they were like "No, you're a technician". The difference in their eyes is that engineers are designing and implementing systems, which we ofc do in software development, whereas technicians solve low-level problems in those systems.
At least in university I went, first 2 years was pretty much general engineering, with chemistry and biology etc. included. Even now, most of grantpas and grantmas around, I'm speaking with, if I tell them, that I'm engineer, they trying to ask me to fix their TV/computer/washing machine etc. In most cases, I'm trying...
