Chapter 4. NGINX Plus and Microsoft Azure Load Balancers
Microsoft Azure has three options for load balancing: NGINX Plus, the Azure load balancing services, or NGINX Plus in conjunction with the Azure load balancing services.1 The following aims to give you enough information to decide which best works for you and shows you how using NGINX Plus with Azure Load Balancer can give you a highly available HTTP load balancer with rich Layer 7 (L7) functionality.
Azure gives its users two choices for a load balancer: Azure Load Balancer for basic TCP/UDP load balancing (at Layer 4 [L4], the network layer) and Azure Application Gateway for HTTP/HTTPS load balancing (at L7, the application layer). Although these solutions work for simple use cases, they do not provide many features that come standard with NGINX Plus.
Table 4-1 provides a comparison of NGINX features with Azure options.
| Feature | Azure Application Gateway | Azure Load Balancer | NGINX Plus | Both Plus & Load Balancer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mitigation capability | Application layer (Layer 7) | Application layer (Layer 7) | ||
| HTTP-aware | ✓ | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| HTTP/2-aware | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| WebSocket-aware | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| TCP/UDP | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Load balancing methods | Simple | Simple | Advanced | Advanced |
| SSL/TLS termination | ✓ | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| SSL offloading | ✓ | — | ✓ | |
| URL request mapping | ✓ | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| URL rewriting and redirecting | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| HTTP health checks | Simple | Simple | Advanced | Advanced |
| TCP/UDP health checks | — | Simple ... |