F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing are key competitors in the load balancing category. F5 BIG-IP LTM stands out in customization and performance, while Amazon Elastic Load Balancing is noted for its scalability and integration with AWS.
Features: F5 BIG-IP LTM users value iRules for advanced traffic management, iApps for application deployment, and comprehensive application delivery capabilities that meet complex environment needs. Amazon Elastic Load Balancing effectively integrates with AWS services, offering auto-scaling and strong security features, with a focus on ease of integration and management.
Room for Improvement: F5 BIG-IP LTM is often critiqued for its high costs, absence of a pay-as-you-grow model, and complex configurations. It also has limited reporting capabilities and challenges in supporting low-end platforms. In contrast, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing could improve in technical support response times, enhance routing policies, and simplify reporting especially with Terraform integration.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: F5 BIG-IP LTM is predominantly used on-premises with varying support experiences, despite a strong community and documentation. Amazon Elastic Load Balancing supports cloud environments seamlessly, backed by AWS's reputable customer service, and offers flexible deployment largely dependent on cloud services.
Pricing and ROI: F5 BIG-IP LTM is perceived as expensive but offers significant long-term benefits for businesses requiring advanced features, typically under subscription-based licensing with additional charges for enhanced functionalities. Amazon Elastic Load Balancing is more cost-effective, utilizing a pay-as-you-go model that attracts organizations seeking scalable, budget-friendly options.
Elastic Load Balancing is a part of a total solution package.
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing requires minimal personnel for handling, which contributes to organizational value either in terms of cost savings or efficiency.
The major return on investment is the security of our data.
The support team has architects available.
The technical support is very responsive due to the prime-level support package.
I would rate Amazon's technical support a nine out of ten.
I would rate the technical support of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) nine out of ten.
It automatically scales up or down based on the quantity of requests, optimizing cost while efficiently managing varying workloads.
Managing traffic load is efficient as Auto Scaling Group can easily be connected with ALB based on the number of requests.
It is a stable and reliable service of AWS.
Improvements could involve making Amazon Elastic Load Balancing a global service, as currently, it is region-specific.
The ability to directly block specific IP addresses without additional service integration would be beneficial.
Using ALB incurs a cost as opposed to the free open-source solutions like NGINX or HAProxy.
Pricing is okay, and Amazon has plans to reduce prices further.
The product is costly.
Deploy our solution in multiple availability zones, it ensures that the system is always available and does not go down.
The Application Load Balancer is noteworthy due to session persistence, traffic distribution, and integration with auto-scaling, which helps manage server scaling automatically based on demand.
It is the de facto standard for AWS workloads and supports the AWS ecosystem seamlessly.
One of the most beneficial features of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is its ability to identify compromised traffic and its capabilities in authentication.
Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It can handle the varying load of your application traffic in a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability Zones. Elastic Load Balancing offers three types of load balancers that all feature the high availability, automatic scaling, and robust security necessary to make your applications fault tolerant.
F5 BIG-IP LTM optimizes the speed and reliability of your apps via both network and application layers. Using real-time protocol and traffic management decisions based on app and server and connection management conditions, and TCP and content offloading, BIG-IP LTM dramatically improves application and infrastructure responsiveness. BIG-IP LTM's architecture includes protocol awareness to control traffic for the most important applications. BIG-IP LTM tracks the dynamic performance levels of servers and delivers SSL performance and visibility for inbound and outbound traffic, to protect the user experience by encrypting everything from the client to the server.
BIG-IP LTM provides enterprise-class Application Delivery Controller (ADC). You get granular layer 7 control, SSL offloading and acceleration capabilities, and advanced scaling technologies that deliver performance and reliability on-demand. The highly optimized TCP/IP stack combines TCP/IP techniques and improvements in the latest RFCs with extensions to minimize the effect of congestion and packet loss and recovery. Independent testing tools and customer experiences show LTM's TCP stack delivers up to a 2x performance gain for users and a 4x increase in bandwidth efficiency.
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