Microsoft's Azure Application Gateway is a platform-managed, scalable, and highly available application delivery controller as a service with integrated web application firewall.
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NetScaler
Score 8.7 out of 10
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NetScaler ADC is an application delivery controller.
The best practice for a cloud environment is to use the tools provided by the cloud provider. That's why for Azure cloud, Azure Application Gateway is the most cost-effective solution that you can use. You can use a single Azure Application Gateway instance for load balancing WAF, URL-based routing, and more.
Citrix NetScaler is suited to any environment where hardware load-balancing, application delivery or SSL offloading is a requirement. It's a product that can be used to manipulate traffic flows in a multitude of different ways and its only limit is the protocol, application and imagination of the administrator. It's not a product that includes helpful wizards to guide the admin through each process gracefully. While it is a fairly intuitive product to use, it's not for someone who is not initiated into the ways of networking and network protocols and communication. Nor is this a product that would lend itself solely for the usage of single usage scenarios where small traffic flows would be expected (although if desired the VPX product would probably suffice in that specific scenario depending on the environment)
Uploading images by multiple end-users from several applications like web, mobile, etc.
When there is a high volume of data requests, it helps to queue them based on the type of request. So it's easy to serve and reduce the loading time from the application layer.
An application gateway is useful when it can identify the type of details the user is requesting.
Most of the Application Gateway's features and services can be managed and re-configured via either the Azure Portal GUI or via the Azure Cloud Shell, thus allowing both CLI modes, i.e. Azure CLI (Bash) and Azure Powershell. The v2 version of Application Gateway has significantly improved performance during initial configuration or during re-configuration changes, thus making it much more usable for IT admins, as compared to v1.
I gave the NetScaler a 7 here because the system once configured and deployed is very easy to use. However, if you did not deploy the system and do not have the fundamental background knowledge then you will have trouble using the product in general. Overall it is a great product and service but does typically require professional services to be deployed.
Overall, our organization's experience with Citrix support is that support can be hit or miss. Oftentimes it takes multiple attempts and much longer than desirable to obtain a viable solution for issues experienced with their products. It would be great to see Citrix invest time, effort, and almighty dollars into improving their support and bug fix process across the board.
HAProxy is an excellent load balancer that can also be used in cloud environments (and we do!), and is relied by hyper-large enterprises globally as well. However, HAProxy is a little bit more rudimentary in feature space, it does the core job well and securely, but doesn't provide any fancy additional features. Also, it takes more effort to deploy HAProxy than simply using an in-built feature in the Azure stack.
Netscaler has more features than F5 BIG-IP APM product and easier to manage with friendlier user interface for network admins. It was more cost efficient as well and if you have a Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop environment, it is more compatible with those products as well. Our annual maintenance cost is lower as well.
