Deliver and Secure Cloud-native Apps with F5 NGINX as a Service for Azure and NGINX App Protect

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Brian Ehlert サムネール
Brian Ehlert
Published September 05, 2024

When organizations migrate their workloads to cloud, they often have to address the complexity of application requirements implemented outside of the app using reverse proxies, load balancers, and API gateways. For example, development teams may use NGINX in their application stack to implement security, scalability, availability, and visibility policies, rules, and logic, and they lack depth of configuration control without it.

Cloud-based customers also prefer to consume managed services, driven by desire and demand to remove the burden to operate and maintain infrastructure while ensuring performance, scalability, availability, and uptime SLAs.

We also know that many organizations rely on NGINX’s proxying, load balancing, and caching capabilities every day to deliver their mission-critical applications.

At F5 NGINX, we took this as the base to build NGINX as a Service for Azure (NGINXaaS for Azure) – a relatively unique infrastructure as a service that grants considerable programmability and control not available through other networking services.

NGINXaaS for Azure provides the power of NGINX Plus while eliminating the complexity of installing, licensing, upgrading, and patching your NGINX instances. It features built-in high availability, integration with core Azure services, consistent visibility and management through Azure interfaces, and consumption-based pricing. The service silently handles all the operational toil for you. You simply bring your NGINX configurations and backend applications.

As a first-class cloud service, NGINXaaS for Azure has a native experience across all Azure interfaces – portal, cli, SDK, Terraform.  And it is tightly integrated with other cloud infrastructure services to give you a complete experience. For example, NGINX Plus offers over 200 metrics, giving you deep and detailed insights into your applications – these metrics are easily available through Azure Monitoring integration.

We are also excited to share that NGINX App Protect WAF v5 is now available in Preview as an add-on for NGINXaaS for Azure. NGINX App Protect WAF can be easily enabled with one-click, individually across Standard plan deployments of NGINX as a Service. The preview capabilities include the ability to select default policy and integration with Azure Log Analytics.

Getting started with NGINXaaS for Azure is as easy as visiting the Microsoft Azure marketplace: https://go.f5.net/nm4zmb5q. Anyone can get started with our Basic Plan and later graduate into our enterprise plan that offers high availability with 99.95% uptime SLA, scaling, and full NGINX Plus state sharing.