Azure Application Gateway vs. NGINX Ingress 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.

Incentivized

Best suited if we have to manage external traffic inside your Kubernetes cluster and want to use granular control to your applications.

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• 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.

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• Provide access to containers
• Manage traffic
• Route traffic
• Lightweight
• Near to zero downtime

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• More cost-effective pricing plans are welcome for the future, especially for WAF
• Ability to automate the TLS certificate renewal procedure
• Ability to manage non-HTTP traffic

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• Its not related to Ingress functionality but certificate management with cloud vendor would be a feature i would like to see.

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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.

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I don’t like that it's part of the Microsoft brand. In general, I am not a fan of Microsoft products but Azure gets it right.

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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.

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We are already using NGINX which is so reliable, it definitely lends weight to our decision to select NGINX Ingress Controller. Also, even though it is a little more complex to manage, NGINX Ingress Controller definitely have a richer feature set, better performance, caching, traffic management among other features which was why it was chosen.

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• We are using Azure Application Gateway as the load balancing tool for our applications deployed on Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) clusters.

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• Security is one of the best objective which we achieve with NGINX Ingress
• Cost optimization is one of the business objective

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