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.

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.

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.

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?