March 20, 2021

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Choosing Layer7 Tool Nginx Apache Ha Proxy Api Gateway Afd Frontdoor Cloudfront

Picking right tool of Layer 7 & Layer 4 network tools (load balancer, traffic routes) is challenging especially choosing the opensource, cloud agnostic tech stack . want to share the knowledge on selecting the tools with certain criteria Criteria:

  1. List down the various interaction points - mobile, web, api, intranet traffic, external vendors/parties
  2. List down the applications and source of the traffic
  3. List down the apps/source which requires strict validation, firewall, token validation, trusted sources(intranet calls) Something which can be visualized as a matrix . (Ideally , we require cube kind of a model to represent)
  ReactJS/SPA Functional API cluster1 Functional API cluster1 Mobile External Vendor Intranet App
Oauth Yes (allow certain urls) Yes Optional Yes Yes No
Web App Firewall Yes (DDos..) Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Traffic Route Yes(/images,/html.) Yes-Route to corresponding cluster Not Required Yes Yes Yes
UnAuthorized Check (Token validate) Yes Yes- precheck at Layer 4 Optional Yes Yes Yes

Now find out the possible tools which has opensource & enterprise version support by doing some due-diligence.

  Nginx Apache HA Proxy API Gateway Azure Frontdoor AWS CloudFront
Opensource & Free Yes (only few features) Yes Yes Free (service binding- Long Term contract) Yes (service binding- Long Term contract) Yes (service binding- Long Term contract)
Enterprise Support Yes(NGINX ONE) No (Good community support) Yes Yes(Premium/standard editions) Yes (Standard) Yes(Standard)
Oauth support Yes(Enterprise) Yes(custom plugin) Yes Yes NA NA
Load Balancer Yes Yes Yes Yes(Standard) Yes(Standard) Yes(Standard)
Traffic rules Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Reverse proxy support Yes Yes Yes Yes NA NA
Throughput High Low High Yes High High
Reload config with zero outage Yes NA Yes Yes Yes Yes

Take a decision based on your budget or already existing relationship with the product tools.

The postings on this site are my own, my passion which i have faced in designing, rolling out the products into the market. All the postings are out of box thinking,strategies when making use of opensource packages and don't necessarily represent my employer’s positions, strategies or opinions. Any questions/hurdles, always reach at my email id - C N U O N L I N E @ G M A I L . C O M

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