Do You Really Need A Hardware Load Balancer? Why Not Use A ...

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When F5 came to market in late 90s and early 2000s, it was groundbreaking. It was blazing fast and solid as a rock. The name F5 became synonymous with Load Balancer (akin Xerox to photocopy machine). Its irules can create magic and if you know how to play with it, you had a great skill in demand (it still holds true). Fast forward a decade, for the first time, hardware load balancers like F5 are being threatened by game changing software load balancers like NGINX. In this article I’m going to present few facts based on my experience in the field. Let’s get right to it.

A typical hardware load balancer setup:

The primary function of F5 is to receive the incoming client’s requests and send them to a bunch of backend Servers (typically Web Servers in DMZ). It can do this using varieties of load balancing algorithms (Round Robin, Weighted, Predictive etc). One of the primary benefits of F5, in addition to the speed and reliability is the rich feature set available for configuring Load Balancing.

The primary function of a reverse proxy server is to act on behalf of backend Servers. For the client, it looks like as if the reverse proxy is the one that is generating and sending the responses. The backend servers are completely hidden. This is functionally same as F5 Load Balancer (F5 is essentially a Reverse Proxy Server on steroids)

A typical software reverse proxy setup (NGINX):

As you can see, NGINX has replaced F5 and the DMZ web servers. Now, you have to take this configuration with little bit of salt. You could still deploy bunch of Web Servers and have NGINX reverse proxy the requests to them. It depends on your architecture. But the important point is F5 is gone.

Now let me discuss the comparison:

Cost:

NGINX may have an upper hand here. The primary reason is NIGNX will run on any commodity Linux server you throw it to. The cost is primarily driven by the hardware you choose to deploy NGINX in, and the level of support you buy. On the other hand F5 is a hardware/software bundled solution. So, you have to buy their solution as a hardware/software bundle (Appliance)

Performance:

F5 may have an upper hand, but only slightly. NGINX is probably the first product that really challenges F5 in terms of performance. Critical point to note is that the performance of NGINX will depend on the hardware you deploy the product in. You also need to consider the product line of F5 (entry level vs Enterprise) and NGINX vs NGINX Plus

Reliability:

F5 wins. I have to give it to F5 because over 15 years of my Application support engineering career, I’ve never come across a faulty F5 hardware device. There had been couple of instances where F5 primary node tripped and automatically failed over to secondary, causing some momentary chaos. But it is extremely rare. On the other hand, I’ve seen several Linux machine crash with ugly core dumps in the middle of the day. Go figure. Note that I’m not downplaying NGINX. There is a reason why major companies like Netflix rely on NGINX. But at the end of the day NGINX is another piece of software running on Linux.

Feature set:

I would say it is a tie.

You can pretty much achieve the same thing (pertaining reverse proxy functionalities) using either F5 or NGINX - Irules, SSL termination, health checks, etc. Some experts may disagree, but I’m talking about 99% of the time. There may be situations where things you can with F5 can’t be done using NGINX.

Operational Management:

F5 probably has upper hand. Their Admin interface is very user friendly and fast. With NGINX, you have to meddle with nginx.conf (or use its HTTP API via CURL to change configuration on the fly). While it is not super hard (and in some situations, a better approach), managing the configuration in nginx.conf can be error prone.

With all said and done, you get what you pay for. F5 clearly has proved to be a dependable solution for over a decade and they constantly innovate. Their support is top notch and their documentation is excellent. Still, it does not mean you can not use open source solutions to achieve what you can achieve with F5. My recommendation is carefully consider all aspects of your solution and think long term. When you have all the facts in front of you, clearly one solution will come out as the best choice for your situation.

Best,

Karun Subramanian

Visit www.karunsubramanian.com for useful resources on Application Support, APM and Monitoring

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Share 32 4 Comments Emilio Campos Martin 1y

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F5 is running on Linux as well, based on Read Hat! So to decide to move to f5 because nginx, haproxy or apache is Linux is not a good base to convince. For me to choose an f5 instead of nginx or any other piece of software today, when the CPU is low cost, only justified if your superior wants to cut some head at the moment an issue occurs, because your is in a safe place, you always can say: "sorry boss, I chose the more expensive"

Like Reply 1 Reaction Geeta Desai 6y

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But now F5 and nginx have come together

Like Reply 1 Reaction 2 Reactions Onaopemipo Oyadiran 7y

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Great Article...

Like Reply 1 Reaction Raghavan M 9y

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Precise and well explained !!!

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