Case Study: Criteo achieves low-latency, scalable service mesh with HAProxy Enterprise

Criteo’s Service Mesh with Consul and HAProxy Enterprise

Criteo, a global leader in commerce marketing serving billions of ads yearly, needed a low-latency way to connect frontend apps to thousands of backend microservices. After outgrowing custom proxy libraries and finding an extra HAProxy Enterprise load‑balancing layer added unacceptable latency, Criteo set out to build a Consul-powered service mesh using HAProxy Enterprise as the sidecar proxy (Envoy did not meet their requirements).

Criteo implemented a custom integration between Consul and HAProxy Enterprise—leveraging the Data Plane API and HAProxy’s SPOP feature for runtime credential checks—so each service runs a local HAProxy sidecar. HAProxy became the central proxy for roughly 270,000 service nodes and handles millions of requests per second, delivering TLS encryption, rate limiting, improved observability, very low latency, and measurable cost and scalability benefits; Criteo has open‑sourced the implementation and entrusted stewardship to HAProxy Technologies.

Criteo