Azure Application Gateway vs. Fastly Edge Cloud Platform

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

The service is really well-suited for pretty much any site that is primarily display-driven (that is, mostly GET requests). The network is able to handle massive volumes of traffic and their POPs have spread out pretty much anywhere that it's easy to get them (so basically everywhere but China and Russia). My team witnessed several large-scale attack attempts on some high-profile websites (attacks in the 10s of millions of requests per second) that were mitigated before ever coming back to the actual application; in one case we didn't realize the attack had happened until we looked at the logs the next day. Because it's a cache store option, the default configuration does not cache POST responses, and it can be difficult to set up things like authenticated paywalls as a result.

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

• Very performant and fast -- major companies have drastically reduced page load times with Fastly's edge technology.
• Support for many types of media, including video.
• Image add-on makes serving and manipulating images very simple.

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

• WAF is hard to configure.
• No comprehensive rate limiting without a pricey upgrade.
• Account access controls are extremely limited.

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

It’s the fastest and most configurable.

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

• Fastly dramatically reduces load times for clients all over the world thanks to their global system of POPs.
• Fastly is a cost-effective choice when a highly-performant CDN is required and makes it simple to support data that is quickly invalidated.

Incentivized