F5 Financial ServicesF5 Public SectorF5 AutomationBlogApplication ModernizationF5 Application Delivery ContollersMicrosoft AzureF5NGINXApplication ServicesApplication Delivery ControllersCloud SecurityMicrosoftCloudNetworking
Blog • • 10 minute read

Harness the Power of Azure with NGINXaaS – Advanced Load Balancing and API Gateway

Explore the power of F5 NGINXaaS for Azure—a fully managed, cloud-native Load Balancer-as-a-Service and ADC-as-a-Service. It highlights key features, use cases and provides a step-by-step guide to configuring load balancing, empowering modern app delivery with agility, security, and scalability through WWT's expert integration.

Introduction:

At World Wide Technology (WWT), we partner with global technology leaders and help organizations unlock the full potential of modern IT by accelerating digital transformation through strategic partnerships and cutting-edge technologies. Our collaboration with F5, a pioneer in application security and delivery, empowers enterprises to modernize infrastructure and scale applications with agility.

One of the most transformative outcomes of this partnership is F5 NGINXaaS for Azure—a cloud-native, fully managed Load Balancer-as-a-Service (LBaaS) and Application Delivery Controller-as-a-Service (ADCaaS), co-developed by F5 and Microsoft, NGINXaaS offers a native Azure experience that simplifies application delivery while delivering enterprise-class scalability, automation, and security.

NGINXaaS for Azure is far more than a hosted version of NGINX Plus—it's a comprehensive, as-a-service solution tailored for modern DevOps, NetOps, and AppDev teams. From Kubernetes ingress control and global load balancing to integrated WAF and API security, NGINXaaS supports the full spectrum of application delivery use cases in today's cloud-first world.

Why LBaaS and ADCaaS Are Strategic Game-Changers

In the cloud era, agility is everything. Traditional hardware appliances simply can't keep up with the dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral nature of modern application environments. Enterprises need load balancing and delivery solutions that are:

  • Cloud-native design
  • Fast to deploy
  • Flexible enough for DevOps
  • Secure enough for modern threats
  • Observable and automatable

That's exactly what NGINXaaS for Azure delivers. As an LBaaS, it provides intelligent traffic distribution for Layer 4 and Layer 7 workloads—HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, and UDP—with elastic scaling, health monitoring, and high availability. As an ADCaaS, it goes further, offering advanced delivery and security features like SSL termination, session persistence, content-based routing, caching, and access control—all built in, fully managed, and tightly integrated with Azure.

What Is NGINXaaS for Azure?

NGINXaaS for Azure is a cloud-native, fully managed service that delivers the full capabilities of F5 NGINX Plus-including advanced load balancing, reverse proxy, and API gateway functionality-without the operational overhead of managing VMs or container clusters.

This service is built to support modern distributed applications, including containerized workloads, APIs, and multi-tier microservices, all while maintaining enterprise-level observability, performance, and compliance.

Key Features:

1. Advanced Load Balancer-as-a-Service (LBaaS)

  • Layer 4 and Layer 7 load balancing across zones, regions, and hybrid architectures.
  • Built-in health checks, failover, and weighted routing.
  • Ideal for stateless apps, multi-tier web architectures, and latency-sensitive APIs.

2. Comprehensive Application Delivery Controller-as-a-Service (ADCaaS)

  • SSL/TLS termination and passthrough
  • Session affinity and persistence
  • Application-layer routing and traffic shaping
  • Caching, compression, and URL rewriting
  • Edge proxy support for distributed workloads

3. Fully Managed Azure-Native Integration

  • No infrastructure to manage—provisioned, scaled, and patched within Azure.
  • Deep integration with Azure Monitor, Resource Manager, Active Directory, and Networking services.
  • Unified billing and support through Microsoft.

4. DevOps-Driven Automation

  • Compatible with Terraform, ARM templates, and GitHub Actions.
  • Enables Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD, and environment-as-a-service workflows.
  • Consistent, repeatable deployments across teams and environments.

5. Built-In Security & WAF

  • Protect apps and APIs with F5's Web Application Firewall.
  • Enforce JWT validation, rate limiting, and access control natively.
  • Layered security for zero-trust architectures.

6. Kubernetes-Ready

  • Acts as a Kubernetes Ingress Controller for AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service).
  • Supports complex traffic routing for microservices and multi-tenant platforms.
  • Compatible with progressive delivery patterns (blue/green, canary).

Use Cases:

  • Advanced Load Balancing: Route traffic intelligently across applications, services, or zones for high availability and optimized performance.
  •  Application Delivery Controller-as-a-Service: Secure, accelerate, and monitor apps without deploying traditional appliances.
  •  Web Application Firewall (WAF): Protect APIs and web apps with integrated WAF capabilities built for the Azure environment.
  •  Kubernetes Ingress: Deliver seamless L7 routing and observability for microservices running in AKS or container-based platforms.
  •  API Gateway: Secure APIs with authentication, rate limiting, caching, and protocol transformation—fully integrated with Azure APIs.
  •  Reverse Proxy: Offload SSL/TLS, compress content, and forward requests efficiently for both internal and external-facing applications.
  •  Edge Security: Enforce policy at the edge with NGINXaaS plus Azure-native firewalls and identity controls to support zero-trust models.

NGINXaaS for Azure is not just a managed NGINX Plus instance—it's a strategic cloud-native platform built for modern application delivery. As a robust LBaaS and ADCaaS, it empowers businesses to meet the performance, security, and agility demands of today's applications—while futureproofing for tomorrow's innovation.

Whether you're scaling a startup or modernizing a global enterprise, NGINXaaS for Azure gives you the power, flexibility, and control to deliver great digital experiences—securely and efficiently.

Ready to learn more in depth about how easy it is to configure Load-Balancing in NGINXaaS for Azure? We would see the step by step procedure of configuring Load-Balancing below. We also have a video demo of the step by step process in the bottom.

NGINXaaS for Azure: Load Balancing

NGINXaaS for Azure greatly facilitates the deployment of NGINX Plus instances in your Azure environment. Gone are the days of managing your own computing or container instances; now you can deploy NGINX Plus directly from the Azure interface or CLI and upload your nginx.conf file. In this article, we will look at the step-by-step deployment of NGINX as a service and how to implement one of the most typical use cases: load balancing to a collection of backend resources.

Step-by-step Deployment of F5 NGINXaaS for Azure:

1.) Open your Microsoft Azure account, and search for "NGINXaaS" in the marketplace.

2.) Select F5 NGINXaaS for Azure as shown in below Image.

3.) To Create an F5 NGINXaaS for Azure deployment in the Azure portal, click on Create button.

4.) Now complete the fields Resource Group, Name, region and select the Pricing plan to be "Standard" as shown in Image. You can have your own desirable names and region.

5.) Once the fields in the Image are filled, Click Next in the bottom to reach Networking tab.

6.) Now fill the fields in the Networking tab as shown in the Image. Create a new Virtual network, Select the IP address type to be Public Only. 

7.) Select the Public Inbound ports to be None and Select the Default Option for NGINX Configuration, as shown in Image. 

8.) Once all fields are successfully filled, Click on Review+ Create in the bottom. Azure would Validate your Options and create the resources.

9.) It would take couple of Minutes to complete the NGINX deployment, Validate the resources created for you. It should look like the image below.

Validation :

Let us Validate the resources created for you.

  1. Select the Resources created and explore the Vnet, Public IP address, NSG created.
  2. Click the NGINX Deployment resource to explore settings on the left, as shown in Image below.

Adding NGINX Configuration:

If you have your own NGINX configuration file, this is the time to use it. If not, you can use the example nginx.conf below. It is a default configuration.

http {
 server {
   listen 80 default_server;
   location / {
            default_type text/html;
            return 200 '<!DOCTYPE html><h2>Welcome to Azure!</h2>\n';
   }
 }
}

Select the "NGINX Configuration" menu on the left from the settings tab and copy/paste the copied config into the code block. Make sure the file path to be [/etc/nginx/nginx.conf]

Click on Submit once successfully copied. It would take few minutes to successfully deploy the configuration.

Modify NSG Rules:

A new NSG is created automatically when choosing the "New VNet" option. Let's create a new rule for port 80 and 443 in order to allow application traffic.

1. Select the Network Security Group created in your resources, as shown in the Image.

2. Go to Settings tab on the left hand side menu and select Inbound Security rules as shown in below image.

3. Click on Add to create a new NSG(Network Security Group) rule

4. Add port 80/TCP and port 443/TCP and hit "Add" in the bottom, Once the fields look like the below image.

Testing the Application:

At this point, we have a working cluster and demo application. Time to test!

  1. Copy the public IP from the NGINX Deployment as shown in below Image
  2. Open a new web browser, paste the Public IP address and test the application, You should see a welcome page as below Image.

Congratulations! You now have done a quick install and test of your first F5 NGINXaaS for Azure deployment.

NOTE: In the article we are not discussing how we can configure VM's in Azure but could be learned from the article here. We created 2 Ubuntu VM's and configured NGINX on the machines. Configuring NGINX can be learned from here

Configuring Load Balancing:

If you've ever front-ended web or app servers with NGINX before, this part should look familiar; we're configuring an upstream with a few backend servers (running as Azure Container Instances), with a proxy pass pointing to that upstream. Click "Submit", and there we have it: a working NGINX Plus load balancer.

Once the VM's are created and NGINX is configured on the VM's. The home page should look like the below image.

Once the VM's are created it is very simple to modify the NGINX configuration in NGINX. configuration tab and click submit and it is very easy to enable load-balancing. Below is the config with two servers and basic round robin load-balancing enabled, We can enable different Load-balancing methods by modifying the code, The different Load-balancing methods configuration can be learned from here

Sample NGINX configuration Used in the article with basic Round Robin.

user nginx;
worker_processes auto;
worker_rlimit_nofile 8192;
pid /run/nginx/nginx.pid;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log error;
http {
    upstream demo {
        zone demo 64k;
        server 57.154.208.200;
        server 20.115.42.179;
    }
        server {
        listen 80 default_server;
        location / {
            proxy_set_header Host $host;
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header X-Proxy-Demo demo;
            proxy_pass http://demo;
         }
    }
}

Validation:

Once the configuration is successfully deployed, we haver 2 VM's with NGINX configuration deployed and we could validate the load-balancing by following the below steps.

  1. Copy the public IP from the NGINX Deployment
  2. Open a new web browser and test.
  3. We could see as we used basic round robin method, traffic is shared between the 2 servers equally, when trying to launch the NGINX deployment.

Summary:

This article explores how easy it is to configure Load-Balancing in NGINXaaS for Azure and also talks about NGINXaaS for Azure, which is a fully managed, cloud-native Load Balancer-as-a-Service (LBaaS) and Application Delivery Controller-as-a-Service (ADCaaS). Designed for modern application architectures, it offers native Azure integration, powerful L4/L7 traffic management, built-in WAF security, and Kubernetes ingress support—all without the complexity of managing infrastructure.

Why WWT?

As an F5 Platinum Partner and trusted Azure integrator, WWT brings unmatched expertise in application services, cloud infrastructure, and secure DevOps practices. Through our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), we offer hands-on labs, proofs of concept, and customized deployment strategies to help you adopt NGINXaaS faster and smarter.

Transform your application delivery with WWT, F5, and Azure. Let us help you simplify operations, enhance security, and accelerate innovation.

 

Technologies