The way modern enterprises run their computing is changing at a rapid pace. With infrastructure choices and application architectures favoring flexibility above all else, legacy application delivery controllers (ADCs) are unable to keep up with the changing requirements.

When it comes to load balancers you have probably heard terms such as, "Software Defined Hardware" (yes, they actually said that!) or "Software First" from vendors like F5 Networks and Citrix NetScaler. What they are really telling you is that they understand the importance of software, but need to keep selling you hardware. 

Cisco announced the end-of-support of their ACE load balancers as of Fall 2015.  Cisco has executed on the end-of-life, end-of-service, and end-of-support plans for their Cisco ACE appliances.  Enterprises that currently use Cisco ACE for their load balancing needs have been strongly encouraged to search for an alternative before time runs out and find a solution that will prepare them for the modern enterprise requirements.

A CIO’s mantra for 2017: Relentlessly automate. Digitally transform. 

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.

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.