Likelihood to Recommend For building scalable and highly available applications, Azure Application Gateway does most of the job on behalf of you; automatically load-balancing traffic from a number of users to a number of back-end servers. This ensure scalability and availability. The in-built security is great as can be expected from Microsoft, and user has a variety of tools for monitoring the health of the load-balancing function as well as the health of back end servers behind it.
Read full review Loadmaster is very powerful and flexible load balancer. Variety of options allows to create a complex network of rules and routes. During our website rollout Loadmaster allowed us to run multiple generations of the website simultaneously and seamlessly by doing the content switching on the fly. Powerful API allows easy integration into any development lifecycle.
Read full review Pros Easy integration with Load Balancer and Azure Scale Set to provide a full solution for traffic management. With rich routing rule, we could use one Application Gateway as the central point for all internal applications to expose to the external network. Read full review Where the LoadBalancer excels is the multiple levels at which you can load balance servers. We currently use layer 7 LB, but others are available as well. I particularly like the ability for the LB to know when servers are down, and if all are offline then you can create a redirect to a static HTML page or some other destination that is more informative. The ease in which a service can be created and deployed using already pre-canned templates makes it a very convenient setup process. Read full review Cons Live examples in the Azure documentation Application Gateway UI Blade in Azure Portal can be streamlined Have more advanced feature set as WAF (Web Application Firewall) Hajira Khan Senior Project Manager | Technical Project Manager
Read full review Ability to 'clone' existing Virtual Services for rapid deployment of similar ones. A better API for ease of automation. Simplification of Certificate management. Better explanations of Kemp implementations of industry standard protocols like VRRP (or CARP) More control over device factory reset configuration and forcibly breaking HA pairs at boot time Read full review Likelihood to Renew I'm very pleased with the support I've received as well as the quality of the product.
Read full review Usability Kemp makes it very easy to setup, configure and manage the LoadMaster without needing a lot of help from their engineers. The interface is very easy to understand and intuitive to use. We like how it is not complicated - I can easily have one of my techs login and they can figure out how to setup/configure virtual services for load balancing without needing a manual or tech support.
Read full review Support Rating I don’t like that it's part of the Microsoft brand. In general, I am not a fan of Microsoft products but Azure gets it right.
Read full review Support has been easy to deal with; I have only need[ed] to contact them a few times during setup. Once its been in place and operational, we have not need[ed] to mess with the system [which] is a huge advantage. I like system[s] that do not break and require constant attention in a production environment.
Read full review Implementation Rating The installation was straight forward. Once i installed it, their technical support team helped me with configuration
Read full review Alternatives Considered Other load balancing tools in Azure (Azure LB and
Azure Traffic Manager ) are limited in their functionality in comparison with the Azure Application Gateway, and also, they don't provide security features.
Azure Firewall , although it has security features, is more expensive, and most importantly, it's not a load balancer at all.
Read full review We chose Kemp LoadMaster because it is 1/10 the price of the competition and MUCH easier to deploy and configure and WORKS. We have had ZERO issues with the product since installation. Their engineers and their sales team have both reached out post-install to check in and see if everything is working as expected.
Read full review Return on Investment Positive : Improved performance and scalability Positive : Better and enhanced Security Positive : Efficiency Negative: Cost Negative: More resources to manage. Read full review We used Kemp LoadMaster for many projects. For a lot of customers, load balancers were too expensive or too complicated before we introduced Kemp products. It's not a overly complicated product, so we were able to train many engineers on it and have them get a certification. Read full review ScreenShots