Azure Application Gateway vs. Azure Load Balancer vs. IBM API Connect

The best practice for a cloud environment is to use the tools provided by the cloud provider. That's why for Azure cloud, Azure Application Gateway is the most cost-effective solution that you can use. You can use a single Azure Application Gateway instance for load balancing WAF, URL-based routing, and more.

Incentivized

Overall, it can be stated that IBM API Connect has many benefits and can easily manage complicated integrations. The platform performs best in large environments, especially where microservices and processing of multiple API dependencies are required. On average, we have processed thousands of API calls within a second with good response time.

Incentivized

• Uploading images by multiple end-users from several applications like web, mobile, etc.
• When there is a high volume of data requests, it helps to queue them based on the type of request. So it's easy to serve and reduce the loading time from the application layer.
• An application gateway is useful when it can identify the type of details the user is requesting.

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• API discovery feature is very helpful to allow us to scope the work required before diving into things.
• The ability to set permissions and rulesets at a user level is essential to restrict access to specific datasets.
• Ability for external users (those from outside our organisation) to leverage the API in more restrictive manner.

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• More cost-effective pricing plans are welcome for the future, especially for WAF
• Ability to automate the TLS certificate renewal procedure
• Ability to manage non-HTTP traffic

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• That being stated, every thing you own will have both positive and negative aspects to its use. It can be perplexing at times, particularly when navigating between different functions.
• However, based on my usage of this application up until this point, I've discovered that the only time it lags is when it's downloading updates. Otherwise, it's excellent to utilise for all other customs.

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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.

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IBM API Connect may be less appropriate for small-scale projects with minimal API management requirements, where simpler and more cost-effective solutions suffice. Organizations lacking the necessary technical expertise or resources to harness its full potential may face implementation challenges. In static environments with infrequent API changes or limited developer engagement, the platform's comprehensive features may be excessive for the task at hand.

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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.

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HAProxy is an excellent load balancer that can also be used in cloud environments (and we do!), and is relied by hyper-large enterprises globally as well. However, HAProxy is a little bit more rudimentary in feature space, it does the core job well and securely, but doesn't provide any fancy additional features. Also, it takes more effort to deploy HAProxy than simply using an in-built feature in the Azure stack.

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Our decision to adopt IBM API Connect was driven by its comprehensive end-to-end API lifecycle management, which proved to be exceptionally well-suited to our B2B, Open Banking, and multi-fintech integration requirements. When compared with other solutions, API Connect stood out for its ability to externalize and govern APIs at scale, while offering enterprise-grade capabilities critical for our regulated environment. IBM App Connect serves as our internal integration middleware, focused on backend orchestration and data transformation. IBM watsonx acts as a complementary AI and data platform for exposing intelligent services especially with the code assistant functionality, it is API Connect that provides the crucial layer for external API exposure, management, and monetization. IBM DataPower is an incredibly secure and performant runtime, and lacks key enterprise features such as developer engagement, full API governance, and analytics. API Connect fills that gap seamlessly, offering a unified, secure, and scalable API management experience.

• We are using Azure Application Gateway as the load balancing tool for our applications deployed on Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) clusters.

Incentivized

• It has decreased the average development time of an API by 15%.
• It has simplified the monitoring and tracking of development, keeping it simple and in one place.
• It has reduced the time wasted looking for information; it has reduced the mail loop sharing status and questions.

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