Caddy's binary distribution is closed-license, so beware. If you need it to be truly free, compile it from source. I did like Caddy's simple configuration format, though.

I only have one question, why?

I can understand picking one over the other start, but what motivation could you possibly have to actively ditch nginx altogether?

Nginx struggles at basic stuff like load balancing to microservice backends because of trivial stuff like DNS caching when running inside container orchestration platforms

https://serverfault.com/questions/240476/how-to-force-nginx-...

With the new ingress in Kubernetes & lets encrypt plugin, you probably do not need nginx anymore, if you're adopting containers. In fact, it can be a hindrance to adopting container orchestration systems.

Sounds like it's more haproxy vs traefik or nginx vs Caddy.

If you don't need a Web server, you should probably be using haproxy already;)

Haproxy, Nginx, kubernetes all implement layer 4 & layer 7 load balancing.

If you are aspiring to writing cloud native applications, there is not very compelling reasons to run reverse proxies in my opinion. If its possible to offload that responsibility to the cloud platform vs running your own infrastructure, that is highly desirable for some people.

In particular, I highly recommend checking out Envoy and Linkerd, which enable service mesh architectures and can take the place of HAProxy, Nginx, etc.

Here are all service management projects that CNCF tracks: https://landscape.cncf.io/grouping=no&landscape=service-mana...

(Disclosure: I'm executive director of CNCF, which hosts Envoy and Linkerd, and created the interactive landscape.)

Any docs on the new ingress and kubernetes plugin? All I find is kube-lego which is quite old already.