Akamai Ion vs. Azure Application Gateway

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Ease of management with good UI for making rules and behaviors.
• There is also an API and Code integration for the advanced Dev-Ops team to use as well.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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)

Incentivized

• Support for tickets has gotten better/quicker over the years.
• Also, there is a wealth of information on the knowledge base, documentation, and there is also a message board too now.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Improved conversion rates.
• Reduced page load times.

Incentivized

• Costs increased for the company, so expenses were more than before.
• Was able to get better user experience so users won't feel the website is useless.

Incentivized