Load balancers became popular about two decades ago with the dawn of the Internet age. With the goals of optimizing the performance of newly created websites and ensuring that end users had a responsive experience when visiting a site, the load balancer was an essential front end to web servers and applications. The load balancer plays the traffic cop, using different algorithms to optimize the distribution of traffic to backend servers.

Today Avi Networks and Red Hat spelled out the details of their collaboration to help enterprises develop and deploy production-ready microservices applications. The announcement comes on the eve of the Red Hat Summit in Boston. The joint solution with the Avi Vantage Platform providing container networking services for applications built on Red Hat Openshift will be demonstrated at the conference.

As of January 2014, Cisco has stopped production of ACE load balancers and exited the application delivery market. Cisco is no longer supporting software on Cisco ACE and soon will no longer support the hardware. It is recommended that all enterprises running Cisco ACE make the transition as soon as possible.

Today, Avi Networks shared news of demonstrating unprecedented elasticity and scale with software-defined load balancers. The demo started as a pet project of our CTO, Ranga Rajagopalan. Ranga always knew that the software-defined architecture for Avi’s load balancers that he conceived and implemented with his fellow founders was highly scalable and elastic as verified by Avi’s performance testers. But, what would it take to put Avi through its paces beyond the QA lab?

Dan Warmenhoven is the newest board member at Avi Networks.  SDxCentral's Craig Matsumoto took this announcement as an opportunity to chat with Dan about the changing IT infrastructure and what the incumbents ought to do about it.

This blog post originally appeared in Cisco's Data Center Blog site 

Software load balancers are making a big splash in recent times driven by developer-centric and application-led initiatives. Adding to this growing space of excitement is the up and coming Avi Networks (a Gartner Cool Vendor in Enterprise Networking 2016) which makes load balancers cool again!

In his recent “Network one-liners” blog post, Gartner’s Andrew Lerner invited readers to share their own. We were tempted and took him up on it. Here are the 9 network one-liners - the Avi Edition.

Enterprises are facing significant changes in the way that they need to think about application deployment. They are taking a critical look at choices for their computing infrastructure, application services, and tooling. Many enterprises are making changes up and down the networking stack to drive automation with API-driven capabilities that empower application developers. Specifically, new thinking is driving decisions about load balancers or application delivery controllers (ADCs).  In a recent blog post, Andrew Lerner of Gartner says, “Application-centric personnel drive a return to lightweight, disaggregated load balancers, creating challenges and opportunities for I&O leaders.” You can read more about this in the Gartner’s research note (subscription required) on the topic.

If you have been following the evolution of microservices architectures and container-based applications, you have also heard ample references to the need for visibility.

Humans are compulsive comparers. We have a natural propensity to view things in our day-to-day lives by setting them against each other. It helps us to choose the most desirable option, prevents us from getting ripped-off, or even fuels our drive to innovate and improve. Let me touch on that last benefit conferred by our urge to compare. Last week, my colleague Rob Duncan waxed eloquent about the characteristics of IT champions at many enterprises. These champions exemplify Gartner’s Mode 2 IT behaviors by innovating with new technologies and IT practices. They compare their status quo to choices that can position their organizations to better compete in their industries by compressing time-to-market, lowering costs, and improving their responsiveness to internal customers. So, we asked a few of our customer champions about comparisons that drove their decisions for application delivery and services and their choice of the Avi Vantage Platform. Across the board, a few common themes came up when they described how they were able to shift focus from the tactical, task-oriented handling of appliances to the much more strategic approach of managing applications.