Azure Native NGINXaas makes traffic management secure and simple—now generally available

Continuing Microsoft Azure’s commitment to empower our ISV partners and customers to adopt and modernize their application of choice and run in the cloud, we are excited to announce general availability (GA) of the NGINXaaS offering on Azure.

In facilitating the cloud transformation journey for cloud architects, developers, IT professionals, and business decision makers who are all working towards their digital transformations, we are expanding on our more than a decade of partnership with F5, the company behind NGINX to provide a deeper integration of NGINX into the Azure ecosystem.

NGINX provides load balancing, traffic management, and security tools for users to configure and manage the incredibly complex make-up of the architectures traffic patterns on their cloud and on-premises environments.

“We are excited to expand our Azure ecosystem with the General availability of NGINX for Azure. This strategic partnership with F5 immediately brings together the power of Azure and NGINX’s application delivery expertise to give our developers and customers more native options on Azure.”—Julia Liuson President, Microsoft Developer Division.

Do more with less

Based on inputs from customers in the Open Source world and other users of the NGINX offering, we worked with F5 to simplify the infrastructure management and provide a seamless experience by integrating the deployment, billing, and support of the NGINX solution on the Azure cloud platform, available via the Azure Marketplace.

By taking the management burden away from the user as part of the managed offering, the customer can now focus on the core elements of their business while the custodians of the NGINX and Azure offering bring our strengths to provide a fully managed, secure, and reliable NGINX offering on Azure.

The deep integration into the Azure Control plane also provides another layer of optimization by promoting all the latest relevant features from the Azure Platform to be automatically available to this service.

Deploying and managing load balancer and traffic manager on Azure

The service integrates the NGINX offering into the Azure Control plane. Through this integration, customers can provision a new NGINX service and configure their Azure resources to seamlessly extend workloads to the cloud and deliver secure and high-performance applications using the familiar and trusted load balancing solution. This gives the user consistency in performance and security across their ecosystem via a one-click deployment. In addition, the customers can manage all of the advanced traffic management features they demand, including JSON Web Token authentication and integrated security, to name a few.

Lift and shift from existing deployments

The integrated offering makes it very easy to migrate application delivery from on-premises to Azure cloud. Enterprises and users can now lift and shift apps to Azure cloud seamlessly by bringing their own or existing configurations of NGINX and deploying them from the Azure portal or Marketplace. Users can then configure advanced traffic management and security, leverage state-of-the-art monitoring capabilities, and port custom configurations.

Unified experience

Build end-to-end traffic management solutions with a unified experience. This service gives the user consistency in performance and security across their portfolio of on-premises and Azure cloud apps by using the same load balancing solution and configurations everywhere via the one-click step deployment.

Secure deployments

The ability to control traffic via virtual networks is a critical consideration for our customers. With this integration, users can seamlessly manage configurations between their own virtual network and the NGINX Cloud virtual network via a custom solution leveraging service, Injection. This is further complemented with unified billing for the NGINX service through Azure subscription invoicing.

Getting started with Azure Native NGINX Service:

Discovery and procuring: Azure customers can find the service listed on Azure Marketplace and review the different purchasing plans offered, and purchase it directly with single billing enabled.

Provisioning the NGINX resources: Within several clicks, you can deploy NGINX service in your desired subscription and datacenter regions with your preferred plan.

In Azure Portal experience: Configure the NGINX Networking components:

Configuring logs and metrics: Customers can determine which Azure resource logs and metrics are sent to the NGINX resource.

Source: microsoft.com