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I have been reading about various architecture stacks of larger websites and came across imgur's. They seem to have all of their subdomains (api.imgur.com, cdn.imgur.com, imgur.com...) all pointing to one HAProxy instance that then divides up traffic to appropriate ELBs and associated instances.

Here is a diagram of their system: enter image description here

More info here.

Why not just have the DNS resolve each sub domain to the appropriate ELB ip directly? What's the benefit of HAProxy? Or is it just a remnant of a legacy system.

Hurricane Development
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    More control, I'd imagine. They may have wanted fixed IPs for the entry point into the system, or to take advantage of more complex routing algorithms, or to hold requests without losing them briefly during a bit of maintenance. – ceejayoz Jul 17 '17 at 23:12
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    Subdomains? Yuck... cookies, CORS... until recently, there was no such thing as routing to different instance groups by path matching in an ELB. ELB/2.0, Application Load Balancer, solves that issue, now. – Michael - sqlbot Jul 18 '17 at 02:18

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