Software-defined networks and data centres are coming: But what about my application delivery layer?

Virtualisation provides IT organisations with a significant opportunity to improve management and automation across the data centre, enabling improved resource utilisation and a more dynamic and flexible environment, while reducing the cost and complexity to manage data centre infrastructure itself. As such, Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti said that 77 percent of all enterprise IT departments will be using virtualisation technologies by the end of the year, and six out of 10 workloads are currently running in virtual machines.

You have all heard that part before, but what people frequently ask as soon as they begin virtualising their applications is, “What about my application delivery layer?” It has been a big sticking point for years now – should application delivery controllers (aka load balancers) remain as hardware even in a virtualised data centre for the sake of performance and scale? What would be the added value of a software-based application delivery controller?
With dedicated legacy data centre infrastructure in the past, configurations were static and the application layer was typically highly underutilised. It was challenging to provision and manage advanced services per application in these legacy environments.

Now, with virtualisation and the emergence of the software-defined network and data centre architectures, tremendous opportunities are unleashed at the application delivery layer. As applications get even more distributed, virtualised, and also pushed into the cloud, they become more dynamic and are able to leverage the higher-density compute fabric available in this virtualised environment. With these improvements in the underlying cloud infrastructure, it stands to reason that these old rules about application delivery should be reconsidered.

I’ve got a hardware load balancer, so I should be covered right?
Think again. Traditional application delivery controller architectures are not natively designed for virtualisation, cloud deployments and software-defined environments and the cloud. They rely on a typical hierarchical data centre architecture that bottlenecks a more advanced, virtualised data centre. They often require expensive over provisioning or clumsily designed multi-tenancy that both drives up costs and restricts Layer-7 services that application owners want to use. Layer 7 is the layer that supports application and end-user processes – everything at this layer is application specific; therefore, application delivery controllers should be able to provide scalable, dynamic application support, allow application owners to tap into advanced ADC capabilities, and cut application delivery infrastructure costs by 30 – 50 percent. With these legacy architectures, virtualised applications in a software-defined data centre are like a luxury yacht with oversized anchors pulling it to the bottom of the ocean.

Due to this wide mismatch between today’s data centre architectures and yesterday’s application delivery controllers, software-based application delivery controllers (ADCs) have emerged as the right solution for virtualised, cloud-ready and software-defined environments. Next generation ADCs need to be dynamic and flexible in the same way that the various applications are today.

Software ADC’s are natively designed for virtualisation and cloud portability. This software is easily integrated into the application stack and orchestrated like any other software and managed like a service.

The Top Five Benefits of a Software ADC:
1. ADC for any cloud, any app, anywhere, anytime: A software ADC can be easily ported and integrated for seamless deployment in private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. That means you get the same response for your application everywhere, even as you migrate or burst across clouds. Stingray, for example, is an advanced platform ADC – that means it gives you more than just load balancing, it gives you advanced scaling and offload features, scripting, bandwidth management, and more.

2. Deeper application integration: Designed for better application control, a software ADC’s configuration and scripting language is something any server administrator or developer can use. It is not something that is exclusively for the networking elite.

3. A complete approach to performance: With advanced features such as Web Content Optimisation (WCO), SSL offload, caching, and compression we are able to augment the value of the ADC by extending performance improvements right through to the end user, enhancing their web experience. These features can be deployed per application, in an isolated manner that ensures no one app will impact the rest. At the same time, a software ADC should be able to scale your servers so each one can handle 5 to 20 times more requests. Over the past 10 years, Web applications have become commonplace in the enterprise as well as mainstream for consumers through e-commerce, news, and social media integration. Over the same time period, the average Web page has grown over four times and has grown three times in the number of objects on a single page. This growth has been accompanied by an increase in the complexity of pages, resulting in a slow experience that can cause customers to disengage with an application. This complexity, combined with an explosion in the variety of browsing devices, including iPhones, Android devices, iPads and other tablet devices, demand innovative new technologies to ensure the best possible performance for end users in the enterprise and on the Internet. And the complexity continues to grow with no end in sight. To this point, Gartner has predicted that by the end of the year mobile phones will surpass personal computers as the most often used device for access to the Web and tablet shipments will reach 50 percent of laptop shipments.

4. Integration with Development>Test> Production lifecycle: Software application development tools fit right into modern QA/test platforms and can be used to test exactly the same rules and scenarios as would be used to deploy into global production environments. The right ADC helps developers focus on strategic projects by offloading time consuming work such as testing for every mobile platform, resizing images, and optimising script load times. In addition, an ADC should help developers focus on new features that directly impact revenue growth and customer satisfaction, as opposed to time consuming tasks like optimising for performance.

5. Security at the Application Layer: Attacks against Web applications are increasing in sophistication and automation makes them increasingly common. Recent research by Gartner has found that 25 percent of Distributed Denial Services Attacks (DDoS) in 2013 will be application based. These attacks are geared toward discovering and exploiting weak points, not at the network level, but at the application-layer and framework itself. To protect confidential company information, an ADC that incorporates a web application firewall is a benefit. With this extra layer of security, it is possible to protect against known and unknown attacks at the application layer, secure applications, and meet compliance requirements with confidence.