Azure Application Gateway vs. F5 BIG-IP DNS

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

F5 BIG-IP DNS is well-suited for any organization looking to improve their Authoritative and Local DNS security and performance capabilities.

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 easy of importing DNS records into the BIG-IP
• The ease of searching and locating records
• The speed of creating multiple records when you need to duplicate effort.
• The DNS dashboards to see requests and data points.

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

• More support documentation will be a nice to have.
• I have not automated DNS deployments yet, but it would be nice to have ansible libraries for this module. (I have used ansible for many others).

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

F5 DNS is like DNS with out training wheels and data that can help you make real changes and improvements

Incentivized

• Positive : Improved performance and scalability
• Positive : Better and enhanced Security
• Positive : Efficiency
• Negative: Cost
• Negative: More resources to manage.

Incentivized

• Protection against security threats using DNS as a vector.
• Protection against security threats targeting DNS itself.
• Provide top user experience to application clients, by directing their requests to where they will be treated with the best performance.

Incentivized