Likelihood to Recommend Akamai is a well-established brand name with a great product. It meets and many time exceeds the needs for global content delivery and security management layer at the edge. Fine grain security tuning seems cumbersome as the definition of the app keeps changing. It also requires an investment of time for the setup which doesn't necessarily make sense for smaller scale scenarios. Some products offered by AWS, Azure or the Google Cloud can be more tightly integrated with cloud provider offerings thus easier to configure.
Read full review For building scalable and highly available applications, Azure Application Gateway does most of the job on behalf of you; automatically load-balancing traffic from a number of users to a number of back-end servers. This ensure scalability and availability. The in-built security is great as can be expected from Microsoft, and user has a variety of tools for monitoring the health of the load-balancing function as well as the health of back end servers behind it.
Read full review Pros Content offloading - once rules are set up within Akamai you don't need to even think about how many images or large JavaScript or CSS files (for example) are being served from your own estate, Akamai takes care of it all via rules that are quick, easy and flexible. Page caching - for pages that don't change very often Akamai allows you to set up rules, quickly and easily, to serve up your page content for you, which takes even more load away from your origin servers. Quick rollback - the Akamai system allows easy testing of rules and changes via a staging system, and also offers a quick rollback option, which is perfect for the rare occasions when something has been set up incorrectly. Read full review Easy integration with Load Balancer and Azure Scale Set to provide a full solution for traffic management. With rich routing rule, we could use one Application Gateway as the central point for all internal applications to expose to the external network. Read full review Cons The interface in their control centre could be a bit more user-friendly with some of the settings in places that you wouldn't expect them to be. The search offsets this problem to an extent but it's still sometimes slower than you'd like to find what you are looking for. Read full review Live examples in the Azure documentation Application Gateway UI Blade in Azure Portal can be streamlined Have more advanced feature set as WAF (Web Application Firewall) Hajira Khan Senior Project Manager | Technical Project Manager
Read full review Support Rating Their support documents are excellent and provide a lot of useful information for all their services. The only reason I didn't give them a 10 is that the time it takes for them to respond to an issue could be slightly faster.
Read full review I don’t like that it's part of the Microsoft brand. In general, I am not a fan of Microsoft products but Azure gets it right.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We've used -- and considered -- a whole number of CDN offerings. The good news is that almost all of the CDN products on the market are terrific, and will pay for themselves via increased customer satisfaction and lower monthly hosting bills. For some cases, we're still more likely to suggest
CloudFlare (which has a free tier) or an integrated offering from a cloud provider, like Cloudfront.
Read full review Other load balancing tools in Azure (Azure LB and
Azure Traffic Manager ) are limited in their functionality in comparison with the Azure Application Gateway, and also, they don't provide security features.
Azure Firewall , although it has security features, is more expensive, and most importantly, it's not a load balancer at all.
Read full review Return on Investment Akamai RoI improved over a period of times since it comes with heavy costs, however global deliveries in over 100 counties and global web platforms usage helps improve RoI With the complex UI challenges, ROI could be impacted negatively when you have to invest in operations and time. Read full review Positive : Improved performance and scalability Positive : Better and enhanced Security Positive : Efficiency Negative: Cost Negative: More resources to manage. Read full review ScreenShots