Azure Application Gateway vs. F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)

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

So a lot of companies that have a digital side and they have a lot of applications in the cloud, this is one of those areas that it can protect the net so it can lock 'em down, it'll build a baseline so you understand what that application's doing. So if it sees something not normal, it'll get protected against that.

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

• Layer seven attacks are becoming far more common. Traditionally it was always layered three, layer four, where you get an additional firewall, but with the application layer attacks become more frequent, more popular, et cetera. So having the web application firewall protecting us, and then with the recent Log4j, that's the most recent use case when it gave us that instant level of protection whilst we remediated the Log4j that we had that and the F5 Distributed Cloud WAF was protecting us.
• I have a great relationship with the account manager, my account manager, and I think he drives the best price possible, um, for me, and I'm happy with that price.
• F5 Distributed Cloud WAF is always innovating and evolving.
• We run a very competitive proof value where we run numerous competitors against each other, and then we evaluate from that and then make the selection, and F5 Distributed Cloud WAF was the winner.

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

• So we just had some performance issues when it comes to routing. Because the web application firewall sits in front of our website, which is hosted on-site, we had some trouble with the VGP protocols between the two sites and it took us a while to figure it out. So that is probably one area where we could improve. Otherwise, when it comes to the WAF functionality itself, it's really good.

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

Basically, Cloudflare is a more economical solution at the level of DNS balancing, easy to use with a few simple clicks and that has gained an advantage in the market, however, compared to F5, it falls short of the entire protection panorama that the solution provides since F5 does not It's just DNS that goes further and that's where it differentiates and stands out.

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

• Accelerated time to value as it was a requirement for a workload being provisioned on that cloud
• As an existing f5 customer, access to their solutions integrator (GridZero) made the sizing, licensing, purchases, and downloading of the software very quick and painless

Incentivized