Cisco Wide Area Application Services vs. NGINX

WAAS works best for cookie cutter and some unique network design implementations. is best suited for an all Cisco network infrastructure. however, a number of 3rd party network devices can be used and supported when using this product. it's easier with all Cisco. It is priced pretty high to get into and medium to enterprise organizations is best suited to implement this in

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

• Network file and application optimization
• VOIP telephony optimization
• Citrix application optimization
• Standardized user experience for networking usage

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

• Administrator GUI user interface is archaic and very dated
• Admin GUI lacks a bunch of feature support options you have to do via CLI
• Some endpoint functionality needs to be done at each site instead of from the central admin tool. so redundant effort and can cause site config drift
• Admin GUI lacks some monitoring and reporting options that would be helpful for support and trouble resolution

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

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

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 are already a Cisco organization for network and security products. Cisco provided us discounting competitors just couldn't get to. competitors required more hardware and more complex setup requirements over this product due to our network design. The end result when comparing WAAS to others were going to be the same speed, experience, and pretty much the same administration requirements from IT. The added cost savings won us over.

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

• saves monthly internet service costs
• seamless network experience for all users at all sites
• ok troubleshooting admin portal so some IT skills are required to manage this
• is costly to purchase
• somewhat complex to set up but easy to administer once working

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