Self-service IT and automation are hot topics right now. Why? DevOps and test teams want to be able to have a highly efficient, "Do it Yourself" model. They also want to automate everything. Development, deployment and securing microservices, backup/restore of configurations, and autoscaling microservices are common automation targets. Avi Networks has brought much needed innovation to the ADC market that enables self-service and automation for application services.

The architecture that most legacy load balancers are built on is from the pre-virtualization, client/server days. This architecture is monolithic, multiple tools are needed to provision and monitor, and self-service and automation are simply not possible. Avi Networks has built the first software defined application services platform based on an architecture with a centralized control plane (called the Avi Controller) and a distributed data plane consisting of micro load balancers (called Avi Service Engines). This SDN like architecture creates an intelligent service fabric that can dynamically scale up or down and makes managing thousands of applications incredibly simple.