What is Aralez?

Aralez = Արալեզ — Named after the legendary Armenian guardian spirit, a winged dog-like creature that descends upon fallen heroes to lick their wounds and resurrect them.

Built on Rust, on top of Cloudflare’s Pingora engine, Aralez delivers world-class performance, security and scalability — right out of the box.

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🔧 Key Features

📡

Remote Config API

Upstreams can be updated live via API — no restart required.

🔄

Dynamic Config Reloads

Upstreams are automatically reloaded on config file change — no restart required.

🔒

TLS Termination

Automatic certificate loading from folder, without a restart.

🔮

Zero-Config Protocols

Automatic WebSocket, gRPC, HTTP/2 and SSL upstream detection — zero configuration needed.

🛡️

Built-in Authentication

Basic Auth, API Key via x-api-key header, and JWT verification with token issuance.

⚖️

Load Balancing

Round-robin, failover with health checks, and sticky sessions via cookies.

📈

Prometheus Metrics

Built-in metrics endpoint for monitoring, alerting, and performance analysis.

⏱️

Built-in Rate Limiter

Per virtualhost and per-path rate limiting. Path limits override global limits.

☸️

Kubernetes & Consul

Dynamic pod discovery and health-checked routing via Consul and Kubernetes integration.

🦀

Memory Safe

Created purely in Rust with Pingora and tokio for async I/O and high performance.

📁 File Structure

.
├── main.yaml           # Main configuration loaded at startup
├── upstreams.yaml      # Watched config with upstream mappings
├── etc/
│   ├── server.crt      # TLS certificate (required if using TLS)
│   └── key.pem         # TLS private key

🔄 Hot Reload

🔐 TLS Support

To enable TLS for a proxy server (currently only OpenSSL is supported):

  1. Set proxy_address_tls in main.yaml
  2. Provide tls_certificate and tls_key_file

📡 Remote Config API

Push new upstreams.yaml over HTTP to config_address (:3000 by default). Useful for CI/CD automation or remote config updates. The URL parameter key=MASTERKEY is required — its value matches master_key in main.yaml.

curl -XPOST --data-binary @./etc/upstreams.txt 127.0.0.1:3000/conf?key=${MASTERKEY}

📃 License

Apache License Version 2.0

🧠 Notes