Customers using Microsoft Azure have three options for load balancing: NGINX Plus, the Azure load balancing services, or NGINX Plus in conjunction with the Azure load balancing services. This post aims to give you enough information to make a decision and also shows you how using NGINX Plus with Azure Load Balancer can give you a highly available HTTP load balancer with rich Layer 7 functionality.

Overview

Microsoft Azure gives its users two choices of a load balancer: Azure Load Balancer for basic TCP/UDP load balancing (at Layer 4, the network layer) and Azure Application Gateway for HTTP/HTTPS load balancing (at Layer 7, the application layer). While these solutions work for simple use cases, they do not provide many features that come standard with NGINX Plus.

Here is a general comparison between NGINX Plus and the Azure load‑balancing offerings:

Comparing NGINX Plus and Azure Load Balancing Services

Load Balancing Methods

NGINX Plus offers a choice of several load‑balancing methods in addition to the default Round Robin method:

• Least Connections – Each request is sent to the server with the lowest number of active connections.
• Least Time – Each request is sent to the server with the lowest score, which is calculated from a weighted combination of average latency and lowest number of active connections.
• IP Hash – Each request is sent to the server determined by the source IP address of the request.
• Generic Hash – Each request is sent to the server determined from a user‑defined key, which can contain any combination of text and NGINX variables, for example the variables corresponding to the Source IP Address and Source Port header fields, or the URI.
• Random – Each request is sent to a server selected at random. When the two parameter is included, NGINX Plus selects two servers at random and then chooses between them using either the Least Connections algorithm (the default) or Least Time, as configured.

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