F5 BIG-IP DNS vs. NGINX

F5 BIG-IP DNS is well-suited for any organization looking to improve their Authoritative and Local DNS security and performance capabilities.

Incentivized

[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.

Incentivized

• The easy of importing DNS records into the BIG-IP
• The ease of searching and locating records
• The speed of creating multiple records when you need to duplicate effort.
• The DNS dashboards to see requests and data points.

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

• More support documentation will be a nice to have.
• I have not automated DNS deployments yet, but it would be nice to have ansible libraries for this module. (I have used ansible for many others).

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.

Great value for the product

Incentivized

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.

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

F5 DNS is like DNS with out training wheels and data that can help you make real changes and improvements

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Protection against security threats using DNS as a vector.
• Protection against security threats targeting DNS itself.
• Provide top user experience to application clients, by directing their requests to where they will be treated with the best performance.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized