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:
- List down the various interaction points - mobile, web, api, intranet traffic, external vendors/parties
- List down the applications and source of the traffic
- 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 |
Possible tools which has opensource & enterprise version support.
| 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. |
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