Akamai offers the Ion application delivery controller suite to automatically supply performance optimization to websites and mobile or web applications.
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Azure Application Gateway
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Microsoft's Azure Application Gateway is a platform-managed, scalable, and highly available application delivery controller as a service with integrated web application firewall.
Akamai Ion is excellent if you have the staff to manage the configurations and understand how best to leverage its benefits amidst ongoing Dev work without getting in their way. You'll have to communicate consistently on what the CDN does and does not do as well as drive knowledge sharing sessions on expected behavior or unexpected behavior to help reduce unnecessary troubleshooting from your IT and Dev teams when tickets/issues arise.
Akamai Ion is best suited for well equipped and well informed IT or Marketing teams that can leverage the delivery benefits of caching and offload. Doing so will increase customer satisfaction, reduce bounce rates, improve conversion rates as well as drive more time on site.
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.
The learning curve on using a CDN is steep and requires class time. The initial onboarding and integration with the business' DevOps teams should be a bit closer relationship.
Global vs. Regional management can be a bit challenging if your account is centralized overseas, and you want a local time-zone account manager on your time.
Most of the Application Gateway's features and services can be managed and re-configured via either the Azure Portal GUI or via the Azure Cloud Shell, thus allowing both CLI modes, i.e. Azure CLI (Bash) and Azure Powershell. The v2 version of Application Gateway has significantly improved performance during initial configuration or during re-configuration changes, thus making it much more usable for IT admins, as compared to v1.
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.
