Load Balancing in Microsoft Azure

Chapter 3. NGINX Plus on Azure

NGINX Open Source Software (OSS) is free, whereas NGINX Plus is a commercial product that offers advanced features and enterprise-level support as licensed software by NGINX, Inc.¹

NGINX Plus combines the functionality of a high-performance web server, a powerful frontend load balancer, and a highly scalable accelerating cache to create the ideal end-to-end platform for your web applications. NGINX Plus is built on top of NGINX OSS.

For organizations currently using NGINX OSS, NGINX Plus eliminates the complexity of managing a “do-it-yourself” chain of proxies, load balancers, and caching servers in a mission-critical application environment.

For organizations currently using hardware-based load balancers, NGINX Plus provides a full set of ADC features in a much more flexible software form factor, on a cost-effective subscription.

NGINX Plus provides enterprise-ready features such as application load balancing, monitoring, and advanced management to Azure applications and services.

Table 3-1 shows the NGINX Plus feature sets compared to NGINX OSS. You can get more information on the differences between NGINX products at https://www.nginx.com/products/nginx.

Table 3-1. Feature set comparison of NGINX OSS and NGINX Plus from nginx.com

Feature Type	Feature	OSS	NGINX Plus
Load balancer
HTTP/TCP/UDP support	✓	✓
Layer 7 request routing	✓	✓
Active health checks	—	✓
Session persistence	—	✓
DNS service‑discovery ...