Home > Storage > ObjectScale and ECS > Product Documentation > ECS with HAProxy Load Balancer > Introduction
There are various ways to deploy ECS with HAProxy such as single, highly available or global. In all deployments, HAProxy defines in its configuration file a “frontend” indicating how requests should be forwarded to a pool of servers or ECS nodes defined as the “backend”. If the frontend is defined to be in http mode, the HTTP headers are analyzed and forwarded based on the content of request. If in “tcp” mode, HTTP headers will not be evaluated and requests are forwarded directly to pool of backend nodes for handling. A load balancing algorithm would define how incoming requests is distributed among the ECS nodes. As previously mentioned, HAProxy provides round-robin, least connect and source load balancing algorithms. Either a domain name system (DNS) addresses or virtual IPs of HAProxy load balancer are presented to clients.
The example images of HAProxy with ECS in this section only highlight object access. For NFS, it is recommended that a load balancer be used for high availability purposes only and not for balancing load across the ECS nodes. More detailed information on how to employ HAProxy with ECS when using NFS is described in a later section of this white paper.