AWS CloudTrail vs. HAProxy Community Edition vs. NGINX

It is necessary to enable [AWS] Cloudtrail when using AWS in a production environment, otherwise you will not have any idea what is happening within your accounts. Third party monitoring applications will all require [AWS] CloudTrail to be enabled as well. I would not recommend it solely as a monitoring tool, to get the most out of it you must send the logs elsewhere. Either to Cloudwatch logs or a third party product.

Incentivized

It prevents a single server failure from being a downtime event by adding redundancy to every layer of your architecture. A load balancer facilitates redundancy for the backend layer (web/app servers), but for a true high availability setup, you need to have redundant load balancers as well. So it is well suited for all production related servers and less suited for individual servers that do not require redundancy.

Incentivized

Nginx is well-suited for any web server scenarios, such as web applications, backend or reverse proxy for both application and HTTP requests, and distribution. It is less appropriate for Windows-based applications that run directly on a Windows Server host. In any case, it is very easy to manage, through separate conf files for each application or site you want to host with it.

Incentivized

• API Log
• User activity tracking
• Real-time alerts

Incentivized

• Low-Cost Load Balancer
• Intelligent Request Routing based on URL and/or URI
• Extremely flexible load balancing and healthchecks, can do almost anything including HTTP, HTTPS, PostgreSQL, etc.
• SSL Termination

Incentivized

• Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture).
• Great at serving static content.
• Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability.
• Open-Source (no cost)!

Incentivized

• [In my experience] Cost can easily get out of control with multiple trails on full logging
• Logs can be difficult to decipher

Incentivized

• A few, rare times each year, HAProxy CPU utilization spikes to 100% and server has to be rebooted - this may be related to HAProxy OR it could be an external factor causing this.

Incentivized

• 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.

Great value for the product

Incentivized

It is very easy to use. I was able to find a lot of documents for it on the internet. Very good community support. There are lots of examples available to try. We mostly use a command-line user interface to interact with it. The CLI is also super easy to use and very easy to interact with

Incentivized

This tool is really easy to use and configure. Consumes very less system resources. It is highly modular and configurable. You can easily use it with other tools like certbot for SSLs. You can configure basic security with configuration and headers

Incentivized

We haven't used customer support. We mostly used the community version. We build a multi-node HAProxy cluster with HA to the proxy itself using opensource plugins available. With the support available on the internet and the documents available we don't need to use much customer support.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I think in the end, CloudTrail has more features and you can dive deeper inside the logs so it depends on your usage and what you expect in the end to make the right choice, I would say that both tools are really useful and bring a lot of benefits to I.T. companies.

Incentivized

We chose HA Proxy because it is cheaper than a hardware balancer, it is an open-source solution with a large community behind it and with constant updates. It also allows custom scripts according to needs.HA Proxy is a solution used in many internet sites like GitHub, Reddit, Twitter, and Tuenti.

Incentivized

I have found that [NGINX] seems to perform better throughout the years with less issues although I've used Apache more. I would definitely recommend [NGINX] for any high volume site and I've seen this to usually be the case from most provided web hosts who will pick [NGINX] over alternatives

Incentivized

• Allows us to investigate any strange api actions
• Increases security
• Audit trail of changes made in AWS

Incentivized

• Significantly lower investment vs competitors. In the case of F5s we have Virtual Editions so we're paying for the hardware to run it on top of the several thousand dollar licenses that are required for each pair and we currently have a pair of F5s per client so there's a huge potential for cost savings there.
• Requires our network engineers to learn a new skill or our Systems engineers to take on the responsibility of managing the load balancers. It's not a huge difference either way, but it does impact the way we have done business in the past.

Incentivized

• By using Nginx, we can host multiple web services on a single server, keeping our infrastructure costs lower.
• Nginx maintains our HTTPS connections, allowing us to keep our promise to our customers that their data is safe in transit.
• Due to Nginx's extremely low failure rate, our web addresses always return something meaningful, even when individual services go down. In sense, this means we are "always online" and allows us to maintain brand and support our customers even in the face of catastrophe.

Incentivized