The drive for IT agility is everywhere; to the extent that the word of 2017 is “transformation.”  Whatever you call it, I find it astounding how fast we are innovating.  The adoption of “cloud-like” architectures and microservices is outpacing the impact of virtualization just a few years ago. 

In today’s business environment, enterprises need their load balancers to be elastic and provide network and app teams with the ability to get their job done faster. Applications have to be responsive to users, even when there is a sudden traffic spike. Users are used to an "always-on" experience and apps need to respond to these expectations. Web-scale companies such as Google and Facebook have relied on the combination of industry-standard data center hardware with powerful software that enables them to be agile, flexible, and elastic.

Digital transformation initiatives have led IT teams towards a software-driven world.  We see a similar shift in India as well, with the move to a Digital India.  The explosion in online transactions in such a short period in the country is a clear example.  For instance IRCTC, the Indian Railways online ticketing system, has seen an increase from 29 tickets per day to 13,00,000 per day!  Cashless transactions have gone to 25% from 5%!  We will witness an exponential increase in these numbers in the future.  As impressive as these numbers are, they only mean one thing for data centers - a spike in web/app traffic.  Enterprises are adopting cloud-native architectures in data centers to be agile in spinning up instances on-demand and to automatically burst capacity.  Load balancing and traffic management in these multi-cloud environments has now become more important than ever before.

What are “Elastic Application Services”?

Last year, Ranga Rajagopalan, our CTO wrote a very informational post on “Application Services 101” that has been referenced in many prospect/customer discussions ever since!  If you haven’t read the post, I highly recommend you do.  

Ranga Rajagopalan, CTO at Avi Networks, recently published an article on Data Center Knowledge where he discusses how operations teams can become more agile in their development methodologies and manage east-west traffic more effectively.

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.

We are thrilled to be included in the most recent IDC Innovators report for cloud-native application delivery controller (ADC) solutions.

Eric Anderson, systems architect at Avi Networks, recently published an article on The Newstack discussing the best practices for IT automation for network engineers and architects.

As a resident of New York I am fascinated by the history of this great city. The can-do attitude and swagger of “Gotham” but also the cultural diversity and complexity. As a technologist I am drawn to the mindboggling effort it takes to run an infrastructure necessary to support 8.4 million residents plus 1.5 million daily commuters who travel each day to the city for work. Urban life has always interested me. The photo above is a New York City street corner taken in 1887 only eleven years after Alexander Bell’s first long distance two-way phone call (between Cambridge and Boston). For the next 15 years both electric and telephonic wires would encase the city in an increasingly unorganized, dense web of entanglement. But progress marches forward. Legislation would be passed, money would be raised and the wires were soon moved underground only to be remembered in these old photographs.

If you live in a city with a punishing commute like I do, podcasts are a great relief. My favorite is Analog(ue) with two guys (Myke and Casey) living on either side of the Atlantic discussing tech, devices, and all of their ramifications. I am making the switch from binge watching to binge listening. If you are responsible for networking infrastructure, operations, or a simply a “connectivity” enthusiast, you have no doubt heard of the Packet Pushers, who run a great podcast for all things networking.