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Haproxy appears to provide a lot of abilities for content switching on HTTP Request headers (and URL, etc). However, I'm looking for a solution to choose a back-end based on matching a string (in a SOAP packet) in the HTTP Request body.

Has anyone a solution for that?

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It doesn't look like this is possible judging from the "Matching Layer 7" section of the configuration documentation. You might be able to pull it off with the payload feature but I have never tried this and it sounds like it was designed for session stickyness:

payload(offset,length) This extracts a binary block of bytes, and starting at bytes in the buffer of request or response (request on "stick on" or "stick match" or response in on "stick store response").

That being said this seems like a strange thing to do to me. Having to pull data out of the payload seems like it would be processor intensive. This also seems like a nonstandard way to do this to me. If that is true, even if haproxy can do you might end up making haproxy a dependency of your application (Although I am a big fan of HAProxy, that is never a good idea). You can pull values out of the URL requests, the header, and cookies easily. So we might be able to help you more if you explain why you are looking at this solution.

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Thanks for the response, Kyle. I agree with you about dependencies. The scenario is that we have a third party partner (OpenMarket) that delivers MMS messages to us (in SOAP format). We have a dev cluster and a production cluster and, because of some limitations to the delivery mechanism, we receive messages for both at the same URL end point. Unfortunately, we have no control of that aspect -- so I was hoping to use something like Haproxy to do that content switching. – orangechicken Dec 14 '10 at 18:40
@orangechicken: They come from different IPs by chance? – Kyle Brandt♦ Dec 14 '10 at 18:43
I wish. Some of the requests come with additional headers -- which could of course utilize -- but some just differ in their SOAP message contents. It's interesting that you can look at the request's content's length but you can't search for a string in there like you can with a header. (Looking up a header by name and searching seems like it would be more CPU intensive than a string match in the payload... though I guess that could be a function of payload length) – orangechicken Dec 14 '10 at 18:57
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