DDoS Detection, Mitigation, Orchestration, and Threat Intelligence
Consolidated Security & CGNAT
TLS/SSL Inspection
Web Application Firewall
Application Security & Load Balancing
Analytics & Management
CGNAT & IPv6 Migration
Load balancing of application traffic has been around for a long time. But, as more organizations move to the private and public cloud, it’s undergoing significant changes. Let’s look at some of the important considerations of this evolving technology.
Three major requirements underlie IT operations and DevOps today: agile, efficiency and, multi-cloud operations.
Advanced load balancing has emerged as an important element of modern operations. Load balancing has evolved given these three requirements of DevOps. Load balancing historically only handled distributing the traffic amongst servers and, in some cases, SSL offload.
Load balancers are in the middle of an organization’s application traffic. They’re place in a critical position to see a tremendous amount of information about the flowing traffic.
Advanced load balancing provides more value and efficiency to the operations team. This is especially true with micro-services architecture and the deployment of datacenter containers or Kubernetes environments.
The advantages of advanced load balancing can be condensed into five main categories:
Let’s take a closer look at each benefit and why advanced load balancing plays an important role in promoting team agility, improving security, streamlining workflows and using new technologies.
Increased visibility, insights and analytics allow organizations to accomplish a number of goals, spanning from basic to cutting-edge.
Load balancers are placed directly into the flow of all network traffic. That placement presents an ideal opportunity to understand the behavior and differentiate between good and bad traffic. Load balancer can automatically detect anomalies and, as a result, stop malicious traffic.
Infrastructure security is the responsibility of public cloud providers like AWS and Azure. Application-level security is still the responsibility of application owners as per Shared Security Responsibility. It is essential organizations understand the importance of full stack security and look for load balancers with integrated security.
Security products have traditionally been overly complicated and difficult to configure. Modern security products’ makes it easy for operations teams to quickly configure and use critical functions. Advanced load balancers capable of integrating with advanced security products can increase efficiency and strengthen defenses.
Centralized management eliminates the need to log in to individual load balancers. There you can see the entire application stack within a single pane of glass. Public clouds allow the application stack to run across multiple regions. Centralized management allows application traffic to be managed across all regions within a single console. This provides both efficiency and easy manageability.
Advanced load balancers integrate with centralized management. Central management of policies is even more valuable when load balancers are deployed across multiple clouds. This power adds centralized visibility and analytics of the environment. The centralized analytics corelates data coming from various sites. This facilitates actionable insights across the entire environment.
Observations from one site, especially related to cyber security attacks, can be used for proactive actions on other sites. For example, a cyber attacker is identified at one site they can be blocked at all sites from a central console.
More than 70 percent of organizations have a multi-cloud environment. Any technology they adopt today must integrate across the entire environment. This includes public clouds, private clouds, data centers, and bare-metal servers. This requirement applies to choosing a load balancer.
It’s important that load balancers have APIs for integration. Many enterprises have already implemented continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines. Load balancers need to integrate with
DevOps toolchain and infrastructure platforms.Full integration is achieved only when API calls are possible in all directions. DevOps tools can call the load balancer API. Load balancer can call the external API in case of an alert or event.
The industry is adopting containers and container orchestration systems. According to a recent survey by 451 Research, 71% of enterprises are either using or evaluating options like Kubernetes and Docker.
Applications are moving from monolithic to a microservice architecture. Deployments are migrating from traditional hardware servers with virtual machines running on the cloud, to containers running on multiple environments.
Kubernetes and Docker have been adopted by many of the industry’s top players, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, VMware, RedHat, IBM and more. Docker and Kubernetes have as a result become de-facto standards.
Data center criteria should include integration with container technologies. It must automatically scale containerized applications as needed while simultaneously maintaining complete visibility. This eliminates the need to manually configure policies or manage scaling.
Given the significant benefits of advanced load balancing, it’s easy to see why organizations are turning to new and advanced load balancing solutions.
Learn about five benefits of advanced load balancing in Azure with our webinar. Kamal Anand and Sudarshan Raghavan share their insights on the evolution of load balancing, the requirements for operations teams, and the advantages of advanced load balancing.
Special thanks to Keith Vital, Director of Cloud and AI at Microsoft, for his contributions to this webinar.
