Azure Application Gateway vs. Azure Functions

The best practice for a cloud environment is to use the tools provided by the cloud provider. That's why for Azure cloud, Azure Application Gateway is the most cost-effective solution that you can use. You can use a single Azure Application Gateway instance for load balancing WAF, URL-based routing, and more.

Incentivized

They're great to embed logic and code in a medium-small, cloud-native application, but they can become quite limiting for complex, enterprise applications.

Incentivized

• Uploading images by multiple end-users from several applications like web, mobile, etc.
• When there is a high volume of data requests, it helps to queue them based on the type of request. So it's easy to serve and reduce the loading time from the application layer.
• An application gateway is useful when it can identify the type of details the user is requesting.

Incentivized

• They natively integrate with many triggers from other Azure services, like Blob Storage or Event Grid, which is super handy when creating cloud-native applications on Azure (data wrangling pipelines, business process automation, data ingestion for IoT, ...)
• They natively support many common languages and frameworks, which makes them easily approachable by teams with a diverse background
• They are cheap solutions for low-usage or "seasonal" applications that exhibits a recurring usage/non-usage pattern (batch processing, montly reports, ...)

Incentivized

• More cost-effective pricing plans are welcome for the future, especially for WAF
• Ability to automate the TLS certificate renewal procedure
• Ability to manage non-HTTP traffic

Incentivized

• My biggest complaint is that they promote a development model that tightly couples the infrastructure with the app logic. This can be fine in many scenarios, but it can take some time to build the right abstractions if you want to decouple you application from this deployment model. This is true at least using .NET functions.
• In some points, they "leak" their abstraction and - from what I understood - they're actually based on the App Service/Web App "WebJob SDK" infrastructure. This makes sense, since they also share some legacy behavior from their ancestor.
• For larger projects, their mixing of logic, code and infrastructure can become difficult to manage. In these situations, good App Services or brand new Container Apps could be a better fit.

Incentivized

Most of the Application Gateway's features and services can be managed and re-configured via either the Azure Portal GUI or via the Azure Cloud Shell, thus allowing both CLI modes, i.e. Azure CLI (Bash) and Azure Powershell. The v2 version of Application Gateway has significantly improved performance during initial configuration or during re-configuration changes, thus making it much more usable for IT admins, as compared to v1.

Incentivized

I don’t like that it's part of the Microsoft brand. In general, I am not a fan of Microsoft products but Azure gets it right.

Incentivized

HAProxy is an excellent load balancer that can also be used in cloud environments (and we do!), and is relied by hyper-large enterprises globally as well. However, HAProxy is a little bit more rudimentary in feature space, it does the core job well and securely, but doesn't provide any fancy additional features. Also, it takes more effort to deploy HAProxy than simply using an in-built feature in the Azure stack.

Incentivized

This is the most straightforward and easy-to-implement server less solution. App Service is great, but it's designed for websites, and it cannot scale automatically as easily as Azure Functions. Container Apps is a robust and scalable choice, but they need much more planning, development and general work to implement. Container Instances are the same as Container Apps, but they are extremely more limited in termos of capacity. Kubernetes Service si the classic pod container on Azure, but it requires highly skilled professional, and there are not many scenario where it should be used, especially in smaller teams.

Incentivized

• We are using Azure Application Gateway as the load balancing tool for our applications deployed on Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) clusters.

Incentivized

• They allowed me to create solutions with low TCO for the customer, which loves the result and the low price, that helped me create solutions for more clients in less time.
• You can save up to 100% of your compute bill, if you stay under a certain tenant conditions.

Incentivized