F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs. NGINX Plus

There was a need to have the DR environment to be available actively but not to send the traffic unless the production is down The F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) priority feature helped achieving it. It was well suited in handling the HTTP headers using polices and iRules. It was less appropriate from the application security perspective in the current version. But after attending the AppWorld 2024, I see a lot of ways to protect the network and the application with several features.

Incentivized

Makes our life easy as application admins in securing our applications and making them accessible. We can easily add an application within a few minutes and define the backend servers right away.

Incentivized

• It is great for front-ending certificates as well as optimizing traffic to the back end nodes.
• It works really well at being able to manipulate traffic flows with iRules as well.

Incentivized

• Load balancing
• Caching
• App security
• Boost App performance

Incentivized

• Time investment in creating Virtual Servers across many LTMs
• Ability to change object names after creation
• Support ability to troublshoot iRUles

Incentivized

• Update full config via api

Incentivized

F5 has always been one of the best products we have in the data center. We had few issues with the BUG and Code upgrades but the main use cases for F5 was always top notch. From High availability to Globally load balancing applications across multiple data centers and muti cloud environments.

Incentivized

No reason not to renew it, we are happy with it.

Incentivized

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is a very good product. It is used in our company widely. So far we are very happy with the product. Esspecially on the load balancing and TLS encryption and Traffic redirecting based on HTTP path and http query. iRules is very easy to use as well.

Incentivized

It's been great for us for 3+ years now.

Incentivized

We had an issue after upgrading from RHEL 7 to 8, and there were some issues that the security team imposed upon the platform with a scanning tool. We also had a VXLAN environment that was not properly sending a gratuitous arp to the network. NGINX support was instrumental to speedily resolving our issue.

Incentivized

The F5 LTMs integrate great with the F5 DNS appliances and makes on the fly decisions using iquery. We have two HA data centers that the F5 LTMs are used in and integrate great with teh F5 DNS servers

Incentivized

The API and dashboard alone make NGINX Plus a better choice.

Incentivized

• Negative impact in that it makes it very easy for applications to be spun up but cleanup of old/ unused deployments do not happen causing resources to be consumed unnecessarily
• When used in a multiblade viprion guest, issues with backplane and blade replication causing impact
• Ability to deploy multiple instances helped with network segmentation

Incentivized

• More uptime for business critical applications
• Less overhead for administrator to maintain the applications

Incentivized