Amazon Elastic Load Balancing vs. NetScaler

It really is a straight-up situation. From my current experience if you have two or more services hosted on Amazon web services that need transactions between each other with a variable flow of traffic then elb is a fantastic method for routing that traffic and making sure that no one back and component gets overloaded with requests while other existing components are just standing there idle waiting for some traffic. As noted earlier in my review we are still doing a trial run with the service as not all of our components are hosted on AWS yet and we aren't having as great luck with transactions between hosted and non-hosted but that could also simply be a learning curve on our part.

Incentivized

Citrix NetScaler is suited to any environment where hardware load-balancing, application delivery or SSL offloading is a requirement. It's a product that can be used to manipulate traffic flows in a multitude of different ways and its only limit is the protocol, application and imagination of the administrator. It's not a product that includes helpful wizards to guide the admin through each process gracefully. While it is a fairly intuitive product to use, it's not for someone who is not initiated into the ways of networking and network protocols and communication. Nor is this a product that would lend itself solely for the usage of single usage scenarios where small traffic flows would be expected (although if desired the VPX product would probably suffice in that specific scenario depending on the environment)

Incentivized

• Good price for a complete load balancing solution
• Very useful rules editor on listener
• Working in conjuction with AWS WAF, is a good option to protect your applications

Incentivized

• The GUI interface is fairly easy to learn making ramp-up time faster than some similar products.
• It is used by thousands of companies around the globe so finding free support on Google is usually quite easy.
• The virtual implementation version of the product runs on a Linux-based hypervisor install so no additional licensing is needed for the OS.
• When used in conjunction with a Citrix Web front/Storefront, the integration is very tight making the passing of packets very quick.
• Even in the lesser VPX versions, there is the ability to have a cluster of Netscalers to allow for uptime capability.

Incentivized

• There are not a lot of cons but we can mention the need to always check the quotas for the ELB

Incentivized

• At times it seems like there is a flurry of firmware updates needed to remediate security vulnerabilities which creates some overhead.
• Out of the box automation using ADM is a bit lacking
• Nit picking but occasionally there are minor config changes that need to be done via CLI or GUI but nothing significant.

Incentivized

AWS Elastic Load Balancing has this trick. First, you need to know how it works. ELB is not the only piece here. ELB has a very close relation with AWS Target Groups. You create or select a target group every time you create a Load balancer. Target groups allow you to connect the load balancer to EC2 autoscaling groups, Lambda functions, or even a single EC2 instance. While this sounds complex, it becomes easy, once you know his tricks. Thanks to the user interface, managing a ELB is an easy task. The rules editor is really useful, although it will need a bit of improvement to some interface items

Incentivized

I gave the NetScaler a 7 here because the system once configured and deployed is very easy to use. However, if you did not deploy the system and do not have the fundamental background knowledge then you will have trouble using the product in general. Overall it is a great product and service but does typically require professional services to be deployed.

Incentivized

AWS gives you several support plans. On the free plan, you basicaly need to google for help, but the good news is that AWS Elastic Load Balancing works. We has more than 15 load balancers and we never run into a problem that require support. But you mght consider a support plan if you are going to do something more complex or critical

Incentivized

Overall, our organization's experience with Citrix support is that support can be hit or miss. Oftentimes it takes multiple attempts and much longer than desirable to obtain a viable solution for issues experienced with their products. It would be great to see Citrix invest time, effort, and almighty dollars into improving their support and bug fix process across the board.

Incentivized

We have not used any other solution out there in the market but our dev-ops team did deep research and AWS provided us the solution we needed to be cost-effective. Also, the decision to keep working with Amazon was strategic. We were already using other AWS features and [Amazon Elastic Load Balancing] integrates great with those.

Incentivized

Netscaler has more features than F5 BIG-IP APM product and easier to manage with friendlier user interface for network admins. It was more cost efficient as well and if you have a Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop environment, it is more compatible with those products as well. Our annual maintenance cost is lower as well.

Incentivized

• Allows us to troubleshoot and address network issues, which improves our end user experience
• Provides an integrated way to balance our network load without having to deal with other suites besides AWS, saving time and effort
• Allows us to see the effects that different code changes have on our network performance, which means more efficient development on the back end

Incentivized

• Features - There are many features to be used that we haven't quite gotten to.
• Licensing - The need for licensing is one of those necessary evils.
• Reporting - It gave our management team the requested graphs and statistics on usage.

Incentivized