Microsoft's Azure Application Gateway is a platform-managed, scalable, and highly available application delivery controller as a service with integrated web application firewall.
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Barracuda Load Balancer ADC
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The Barracuda Load Balancer ADC is a Secure Application Delivery Controller that enables Application Availability, Acceleration and Control, while providing Application Security Capabilities.
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.
For an important high availability website such as for email, this is a great solution. However, it does in a way, create it's own single point of failure in that if it goes down all the web servers it services are no longer available but there are ways around that rather than just spending more on a secondary unit. There are probably less expensive units or DNS methods you could use for less critical web sites you are trying to maintain. But for exchange and multiple website support with excellent reliability and support, this is a good solution.
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.
The configuration settings are relatively granular, but instructions often only list the necessary fields, so if you need some custom settings it can be a little hunt and find what you need.
Their support knowledge base page has instructions, but it can be difficult to navigate. There are different versions for different generations of both the barracuda devices and also the connecting software. (looking for setting up the Microsoft Exchange Load balancing can get you different instructions for each level of load balancer and also each version of Exchange).
The internal logging review screens and settings can take a while to get used to how it is structured. It can also take a few tries to configure the service logging to get the type of information you'd like.
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.
Barracuda, in general, has very responsive and high-quality support. It's fantastic to be able to get someone on the phone quickly when you need help or a fast call back. With instant replacement, you can feel assured that in the case of a complete failure, you will have a new unit with configuration intact within a day or two. One of the best for support in my experience.
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.
We also had looked at Kemp and F5. The Kemp and F5 had a lot of horsepower and advanced configuration and functionality. When we looked at our workload and how we were planning on using the load balancers, we really didn't need all those extra bells and whistles. Barracuda provided all the standard functionality we needed and were looking for and did so at a greatly reduced price point.
It was a prerequisite for moving to Microsoft Exchange 2016, which requires a load balancer solution as part of the design. So, it allowed us to move forward with that upgrade. Having it to load balance VDI sessions is a bonus.
