Microsoft recently announced NGINX for Azure, a natively integrated software solution (SaaS) with advanced traffic management and monitoring. The service is available in preview in Azure Marketplace.
NGINX for Azure is the result of close collaboration between Microsoft and F5the company behind the open source solution Nginx – one of the most used traffic managers. The fully managed Azure Nginx offering provides a simplified developer experience for deployment, management, billing, and support.
Azure integration enables easy provisioning and configuration in a few steps in the Azure portal. Users can take advantage of advanced traffic management features, such as JSON Web Token (JWT) Authentication and active health checks, with built-in security integrations such as Azure Key Vault for SSL/TLS certificate management.
On a technical community blog post about the preview of Nginx for Azure, Rohit TatacharSenior PM at Microsoft said:
The service integrates the Nginx SaaS offer into the Azure infrastructure (Control Plane). With this integration, you will be able to provision a new Nginx service and configure your Azure resources to leverage Nginx as a reverse proxy/load balancer.
Additionally, users can also bring their existing Nginx configuration file (single or multiple files) and apply it directly to Ngnix for Azure or via CI-CD pipelines via GitHub integrations.
Overall, the objective of the offer is to facilitate the use of Nginx. Chris GuzikowskiProduct Marketing Manager, NGINX at F5, said in an Nginx blog post:
Above all, NGINX Plus is no longer an “external” solution. NGINX for Azure unleashes the power of NGINX Plus fully within your Azure environment, reducing your overall stack complexity.
In addition, Jeff Girouxglobal solutions architect at F5, explains in an F5 community article the advantage of using Nginx for Azure:
F5 NGINX for Azure frees you from having to deploy your own NGINX Plus cluster, install libraries, upgrade, and other tasks. Whether you’re an existing or new NGINX customer, that means speed and simplicity with no IaaS to manage. This ease of use means there is no need for specialist knowledge, which is especially great for customers new to NGINX.
Pricing for NIGNX for Azure starts at $0.01, and more pricing details are available at pricing page. Additionally, details of the SaaS offering itself are available on the documentation landing page.