I think that NGINX Plus could be used in place of a hardware load balancer and it would be light weight and easier to configure than a hardware based load balancer but in terms of usability a GUI for said load balancer would definitely help in setting up
The software web application is beyond terrible, in most of the cases the web was broken or did not have similar functionality the command line interface had.
The command line interface wasn't a natural looking interface, it was very fumbled and while it ran on Linux, the interface was all menus and sub-menus.
When enabling different pools for different web services, when a new pool was activated, the old pool connections were all reset instead of allowing HTTP sessions to naturally expire.
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.
We moved away from Alteon to F5 BigIP LTM and just by swapping out the hardware, we saw 40% speed increase in our applications. Everything else is much improved as well, from the web interface to the command line to the API.
We are planning by using NGINX it can greatly reduce our OPEX by 50% "just our own running APIGW" the cascading effects in the long run will be much more.
