F5 NGINX Plus: Load Balancing / App Protect

F5 NGINX Plus: Load Balancing

Balancing your network traffic across servers, clients, and proxies is key to keeping your customers happy and optimizing your infrastructure. With NGINX Plus high‑performance load balancing, you can scale out and provide redundancy, dynamically reconfigure your infrastructure without the need for a restart, and enable global server load balancing (GSLB), session persistence, and active health checks. NGINX Plus load balances not only HTTP traffic, but also TCP, UDP, and gRPC.

**HTTP Load Balancing **

When load balancing HTTP traffic, NGINX Plus terminates each HTTP connection and processes each request individually. You can strip out SSL/TLS encryption, inspect and manipulate the request, queue the request using rate limits, and then select the load balancing policy. To improve performance, NGINX Plus can automatically apply a wide range of optimizations to an HTTP transaction, including HTTP protocol upgrades, keepalive optimization, and transformations such as content compression and response caching.

TCP and UDP Load Balancing

NGINX Plus can also load balance TCP applications such as MySQL, and UDP applications such as DNS and RADIUS. For TCP applications, NGINX Plus terminates the TCP connections and creates new connections to the backend.

Active Health Checks

By default NGINX performs basic checks on responses from upstream servers, retrying failed requests where possible. NGINX Plus adds out-of-band application health checks (also known as synthetic transactions) and a slow‑start feature to gracefully add new and recovered servers into the load‑balanced group. In the example below, NGINX Plus sends a request for /test.php every five seconds. The match block defines the conditions the response must meet in order for the upstream server to be considered healthy: a status code of 200 OK and a response body containing the text ServerN is alive. Note: Active health checks are exclusive to NGINX Plus.

https://www.nginx.com/products/nginx/load-balancing

F5 NGINX App Protect

NGINX App Protect is a lightweight software security solution that seamlessly integrates into DevOps environments as a robust web application firewall (WAF) and Layer 7 denial-of-service (DoS) defense. It is platform-agnostic and runs across distributed architectures and hybrid environments to deliver consistent protection.

Scalable Protection

Leverage F5’s proven and trusted advanced WAF technology combined with the lightweight, high performance of NGINX for a fast, scalable, Layer 7 defense. With NGINX App Protect WAF and DoS you can: • Exceed basic OWASP Top 10 protection with over 7,500 advanced signatures, bot signatures, and threat campaign protection • Protect your organization’s HTTP/S and HTTP/2 applications, as well as protocols such as GraphQL (WAF), gRPC (WAF and DoS) and WebSocket (DoS) • Significantly reduce false positives by deploying in blocking mode with trusted high-confidence signatures • Enable cost-effective distributed DoS (DDoS) protection at scale with continuous measurement of mitigation effectiveness and adaptive learning for no-touch policy configuration • Easily gain centralized visibility and configuration management over your WAF fleet with built-in NGINX tools or by forwarding telemetry to third-party solutions

DevSecOps

Enable a shift-left strategy where security is incorporated at every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). With NGINX App Protect you can: • Reduce the cost of breaches by up to 80% via security automation • Implement DevSecOps with declarative security policies created by IT Security teams that enable developers to integrate security as code into CI/CD pipelines • Save time and money by finding and fixing vulnerabilities before an app is released into production • Maintain developer agility and innovation while building more reliable and secure apps • Accelerate time to market and reduce costs, staying ahead of the competition and keeping up with customer demand

https://www.nginx.com/products/nginx-app-protect/