NGINX vs. OCI API Management

[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

Oracle API Manager is well suited in a business or company that make use of Apis to facilitate access of backend services and data sources by the staff or customers or both. It is also imported in situations where all actions in a system need to be attributed to specific users.

Incentivized

• Straight-forward configuration format that users of all skill levels can learn, and yet is powerful enough for the huge breadth of features that Nginx provides.
• Massive scale right out the box. We've never had a Nginx instance overwhelmed by requests, and if we did it would be trivial to spin up more Nginx instances to handle the load.
• SSL termination means that we can deliver content over HTTPS without needing our individual services to require TLS support. This saves us a lot of time and headache while keeping us secure.
• Nginx is open-source and free, meaning that anyone can use it to power their services, from individual projects to billion-dollar websites.

Incentivized

• Mature and Reliable. Last year, Oracle API Manager was quite buggy, and couldn't be used at production-level. Fortunately, almost all of the problems that it had previously are now patched.
• Offloads Most of the Workload of Developing APIs. While defining APIs, Oracle API Manager does a great job in providing suggestions and error checks in our logic.
• Supports SOAP and REST. Not only can you create APIs that can query for data, but you can also create API endpoints that can manipulate the data in your back-end databases.

• 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.

• I would say it would be nice if it could handle non-Oracle type API's...such as in-house developed interfaces, etc.
• It would be nice if it at least could list non-Oracle type APIs so that this system became a repository for ALL of the application interfaces
• Maybe it has this and I missed it, the monitoring appears to be one API at a time, would be nice to see a page that has all of the monitored APIs with some basic monitored info perhaps. It does have alerts, audit trails, and integrates with Enterprise Manager (I did not see this integration though)

Incentivized

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

All of those are paid solutions with very good features, but they also offer dedicated scenarios for web application hosting. If you run applications on on-premises web servers and don't have a Microsoft licence agreement, Nginx is a very good and reliable option, based on Linux distributions and available as freeware.

Incentivized

Oracle API Manager is much easier to learn and understand then IBM Data Power Gateway and IBM API Connect. We selected Oracle API Manager in our company because to have a good intuitive interface with drag and drop features and because beginners and easily get up to speed to use this tool.

Incentivized

• Our websites are noticeably faster, causing an increase in customer satisfaction.
• Nginx has such a low memory/resource footprint that we save money from not needing multiple large, expensive servers.
• Ability to load balance traffic, have server-redundancy, and have high-availability allows for 100% uptime and provides cost-effective solutions to alternatives that can cost a lot.

Incentivized

• Overall, the client is pleased with the API Manager. They are rather new to it so the ROI has not really been realized yet
• They like the ability to monitor the API's utilization (this monitoring could maybe be used for the prior question on usage billing...they do not currently do this for their supported applications)
• They like the ability that the APIs can be secured. Just because it exists, doesn't mean it can be used just anywhere...

Incentivized