Akamai offers their API Gateway, touting easy control and access to enterprise applications via their services.
N/A
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software products o tackle some of the biggest challenges in managing high-transaction applications. NGINX offers a suite of products to form the core of what organizations need to create…
Our well suited scenario is when working with high-traffic APIs. Akamai API Gateway's scalability and performance optimisation capabilities provide effective handling of huge volumes of API calls, guaranteeing users' best possible experience. One less appropriate scenario is that the price of Akamai API Gateway may be too high for organisations on a tight budget, particularly if they don't need all of the platform's capabilities.
[NGINX] is very well suited for high performance. I have seen it used on servers with 1k current connections with no issues. Despite seeing it used in many environments I've never seen software developers use it over apache, express, IIS in local dev environments so it may be more difficult to setup. I've also seen it used to load balance again without issues.
Improvements required to real-time monitoring tools, like more detailed alerting settings and advanced analytics dashboards, could offer more insight into API performance and security breaches.
For less experienced users, setting up advanced security rules or personalising authentication procedures might be difficult and require deep technical expertise.
Although it works well with a range of backend systems and protocols, it could be helpful to offer additional pre-configured connectors or easier integration choices for widely used services and platforms.
Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.
Front end proxy and reverse proxy of Nginx is always useful. I always prefer to Nginx in overall usability when you have application server and database or multiple application servers and single database i.e. clustered application. Nginx provides really good features and flexibility which helps the system administrator in case of troubleshooting and also from the administration perspective. Also, Nginx doesn't delay any request because of internal performance issues.
Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.
Akamai [API Gateway] helps better in terms of representation of graphQL and its consumption in monitoring system making a package for deployment speed with monitoring and scaling application with all services and utilizing most of a system without much knowledge of other aspects. Also, [a] user-friendly system helps people to handle [the] system with necessary options
We have used Traffic, Apache, Google Cloud Load Balancing and other managed cloud-based load balancers. When it comes to scale and customization nothing beats Nginx. We selected Nginx over the others because
we have a large number of services and we can manage a single Nginx instance for all of them
we have high impact services and Nginx never breaks a sweat under load
individual services have special considerations and Nginx lets us configure each one uniquely
Akamai API Gateway can reduce risk as well as save money by preventing expensive data breaches, compliance violations, and damage to reputation by improving API security and reducing risks.
Akamai API Gateway helps increase developer productivity, shorten API development cycles, and allow quicker time-to-market for new products and services with its developer-friendly tools, documentation, and sandbox environments.
One negative aspect is that advanced security policies or integration setup and configuration can require special knowledge and resources, which can extend the implementation period and price.
Nginx has decreased the burden of web server administration and maintenance, and we are spending less time on server issues than when we were using Apache.
Nginx has allowed more people in our company to get involved with configuring things on the web server, so there's no longer a single point of failure ("the Apache guy").
Nginx has given us the ability to handle a larger number of requests without scaling up in hardware quite so quickly.
