What is the main role and purpose of HAProxy in application infrastructure?

HAProxy is a high-performance software load balancer and proxy server used to distribute incoming traffic among multiple application servers. Its main role is to ensure fault tolerance, scalability, and even load distribution to improve the availability and performance of services.

For example, if you have several servers handling web application requests, HAProxy will accept all client requests and direct them to the less loaded or available server, thereby preventing overload of individual nodes.