Barracuda Load Balancer ADC vs. NGINX

Barracuda is an inexpensive solution for load balancing web traffic of all kinds and works as a reverse proxy if you need one. It is efficient and has been a very stable solution. If you need extremely granular configuration for your load balancing traffic, then you may need to go with one of the bigger brands. Barracuda will more than handle regular small and medium business use and do so at a greatly reduced price point.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Excellent Load Balancing.
• Flexible configuration - It's very simple to configure and powerful enough to handle many more websites than just our exchange site.
• Continuously updated - Barracuda makes fairly frequent updates to address issues and improve features.

Incentivized

• 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)!

Incentivized

• Overall, there are no issues. It just runs.

Incentivized

• 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.

It is a product we plan on continuing to use.

Incentivized

Great value for the product

Incentivized

It is fairly easy to learn after support helps you set it up and shows you how things work. Which they will do.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It did well for basic needs but would not deliver for all our services.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We also had looked at Kemp and F5. The Kemp and F5 had a lot of horsepower and advanced configuration and functionality. When we looked at our workload and how we were planning on using the load balancers, we really didn't need all those extra bells and whistles. Barracuda provided all the standard functionality we needed and were looking for and did so at a greatly reduced price point.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• It has allowed us to maintain a very high level of uptime.
• It has allowed us to perform server updates without the downtime of services.
• It has provided a consistent user experience by properly balancing service loads across servers.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized