Feature overview

NGINXaaS for Azure delivers the core capabilities of NGINX as a managed service, integrated with Microsoft Azure. It provides most of the features of NGINX Open Source and many from NGINX Plus, but some capabilities are not included.

Below is a feature breakdown with notes on support and limitations.

Load balancing

• HTTP and TCP/UDP load balancing
• Layer 7 request routing
• Session persistence
• Active health checks (not in OSS, available in Plus)
• DNS-based service discovery

Content caching

• Static and dynamic content caching
• MQTT protocol support for IoT devices

Limitation: Cache purging API (Plus feature) is not available.

Web server and reverse proxy

• Origin server for static content
• Reverse proxy for HTTP, FastCGI, memcached, SCGI, and uwsgi
• HTTP/2 gateway
• gRPC proxy
• HTTP/2 server push
• HTTP/3 over QUIC

Security

• HTTP basic authentication
• Authentication subrequests (for external auth)
• IP-based access controls
• Rate limiting
• Dual-stack RSA/ECC SSL/TLS offload
• TLS 1.3 support
• JWT authentication (Plus feature)
• OpenID Connect SSO (Plus feature)
• NGINX as a SAML Service Provider (Plus feature)
• NGINX App Protect WAF (extra cost)

Limitations:

• Internal redirect and App Protect DoS (Plus features) are not available.

Monitoring

• Export metrics directly into Azure Monitor
• Dashboards in Azure Monitor and Azure Portal
• Extended status with 100+ metrics

Limitations:

• No built-in live dashboard like NGINX Plus; visibility is provided through Azure Monitor instead.
• Native OpenTelemetry tracing is not available.

High availability (HA)

• Active-active HA
• Configuration synchronization across the cluster
• State sharing for session persistence, rate limiting, and key-value store

Limitation: Active-passive HA is not applicable in the managed service model.

Programmability

• NGINX JavaScript (njs) module
• Key-value store

Limitations:

• NGINX Plus API for dynamic reconfiguration (Plus feature) is not available.

Streaming media

• Live streaming: RTMP, HLS, DASH
• VOD: Flash (FLV), MP4

Limitation: Adaptive bitrate streaming (HLS/HDS) and MP4 bandwidth controls (Plus features) are not available.

Ecosystem and extensibility

• Dynamic module support for:
  • Image-Filter
  • njs
  • OpenTelemetry
  • XSLT
• Delivered as a managed service in Microsoft Azure
• Commercial support from F5

Limitations:

• Ingress Controller and OpenShift Router are not included.
• Dynamic module repository is limited compared to NGINX Plus.

For a detailed comparison between NGINX Plus and NGINX Open Source, refer to Differences between NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus on the F5 website.