Application Delivery and Load Balancing in Microsoft Azure

Chapter 3. NGINX and NGINX Plus on Azure

NGINX, Inc., a company that is now part of F5 Networks, shares its name with its leading product, NGINX. NGINX has two versions: an Open Source software solution, OSS, and a commercial solution, Plus. These two versions dominate the world of application delivery controllers, both on-premises and in the cloud. In Azure, many companies are trying to decide between the Azure native managed services discussed in the previous chapter and solutions they already use and trust from their on-premises environments. This chapter will explore the similarities and differences between NGINX OSS and NGINX Plus and how to deploy them using the Azure Portal, PowerShell, and Terraform. In the next chapter, we’ll cover comparisons between NGINX solutions and Azure managed solutions.

Both NGINX and NGINX Plus can fit into your web application landscape as a load balancer for TCP and UDP, but they also can fill the need for a more advanced HTTP(S) application delivery controller. NGINX and NGINX Plus operate at Layer 7 for all types of load balancing. You might employ NGINX or NGINX Plus as an entry point and HTTP(S) request router for your application, or as a load balancer for a service that uses a protocol that is not HTTP, such as database read replicas.

NGINX Versus NGINX Plus

NGINX Open Source software, or NGINX OSS, is free open source software, whereas NGINX Plus is a commercial product that offers advanced features and enterprise-level support as ...