Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review [NGINX] is very well suited for high performance. I have seen it used on servers with 1k current connections with no issues. Despite seeing it used in many environments I've never seen software developers use it over apache, express, IIS in local dev environments so it may be more difficult to setup. I've also seen it used to load balance again without issues.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture). Great at serving static content. Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability. Open-Source (no cost)! Read full review Cons 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) Hajira Khan Senior Project Manager | Technical Project Manager
Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Great value for the product
Read full review Usability Front end proxy and reverse proxy of Nginx is always useful. I always prefer to Nginx in overall usability when you have application server and database or multiple application servers and single database i.e. clustered application . Nginx provides really good features and flexibility which helps the system administrator in case of troubleshooting and also from the administration perspective . Also, Nginx doesn't delay any request because of internal performance issues.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review John Reeve Principal, Lead developer, Lead designer
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review We have used Traffic, Apache, Google Cloud Load Balancing and other managed cloud-based load balancers. When it comes to scale and customization nothing beats Nginx. We selected Nginx over the others because
we have a large number of services and we can manage a single Nginx instance for all of them we have high impact services and Nginx never breaks a sweat under load individual services have special considerations and Nginx lets us configure each one uniquely Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Nginx has decreased the burden of web server administration and maintenance, and we are spending less time on server issues than when we were using Apache. Nginx has allowed more people in our company to get involved with configuring things on the web server, so there's no longer a single point of failure ("the Apache guy"). Nginx has given us the ability to handle a larger number of requests without scaling up in hardware quite so quickly. Read full review ScreenShots