Microsoft's Azure Application Gateway is a platform-managed, scalable, and highly available application delivery controller as a service with integrated web application firewall.
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Anypoint Platform
Score 7.9 out of 10
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The Anypoint Platform developed by MuleSoft and acquired by Salesforce in early 2018 is designed to
connect apps, data, and devices anywhere, on-premises or in the cloud. This platform was built to
offer out-of-the-box connectors as well as tools that architects and developers can adopt quickly to
design, build and manage the entire lifecycle of their APIs, applications, and products.
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NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software products o tackle some of the biggest challenges in managing high-transaction applications. NGINX offers a suite of products to form the core of what organizations need to create…
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.
MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is best tool in the market for developing APIs with complex structures communicating with various different types of applications including web applications as well as legacy applications. Also applications including database connectivity for fetching and updating data in the DB tables. I cant think of any scenario which MuleSoft Anypoint Platform could not be used for developing the integrations.
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.
Has more features than what we really need so we're paying for more than we use. Sort of like paying for an Abrams tank when all we really need is a Toyota Corolla.
Not a value product, tends to be expensive.
Takes a while for developers to learn to use Mulesoft Anypoint.
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.
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.
There’s a lot of learning curve at the beginning when it comes to building the code and everything. In terms of usability, I’d say once you get used to it, it’s fine — but it’s not very easy during the initial stages.
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
Anypoint Platform support is very responsive. There is also a huge knowledge base and an active online forum where answers to most questions can be found. When needed support engages the engineering group so adequate solutions or workarounds are always provided.
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.
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.
Once we have moved all of our system integration APIs to the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, we will need to communicate with a wide variety of external systems. All of our business and service logic is stored in the aforementioned core systems. Anypoint Platform (and all of our APIs) makes it easy to connect to various other platforms. In order to link to these many other systems, connectors and/or components are utilized, and they are simple to configure and integrate.
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
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.
