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A10’s Fresh Approach to Application Delivery Enables Organizations to Achieve Flex IT

According to our customer interviews, legacy application delivery models are not keeping up with current business or IT challenges. There have been dramatic changes in application development, deployment and delivery, but most current front-end application delivery approaches are not sufficiently supporting multiple cloud services and agile development.

Instead, they foster using a”spaghetti-mess” of point solutions that:

  • Utilize legacy architectures
  • Are complex to integrate and operate
  • Introduce multiple points of failure
  • Are extremely-labor intensive
  • Slow the pace of innovation

These aging application delivery solutions were designed to succeed in with hierarchical IT organizations, making them out of sync with today’s agile methodologies and DevOps practices. Many of the most heavily deployed application delivery appliances ignore flexible deployment models either for VMs or containers, and they don’t provide closed loop application delivery, critical for running apps in cloud environments.

In other words, current application trends such as micro-services architecture, containers and continuous deployment have evolved quickly, and the front-end delivery solutions have not kept pace. To maximize business value, IT operations teams are seeking simpler processes and flexible architectures. See the picture below to learn more about IT constraints.

IT Constraints: Applications are Multi-cloud

The goal is Flex IT: an IT initiative that cuts the complexity and provides application teams with self-service capabilities along with greater control and visibility into applications themselves. A10 Networks facilitates Flex IT by transforming application delivery from rigid infrastructure- and product-based solutions to an elastic services-based approach.

In April, Gartner named Appcito (which A10 acquired and is the basis for A10 Lightning Application Delivery Service (ADS)) as one of the “Cool Vendors in Enterprise Networking, 2015” for its cloud-native application front-end (CAFE) service, which is now available in A10 Lightning ADS. According to the Gartner report, “the proliferation of public cloud computing has dramatically changed enterprise networking requirements. Network designers can use the innovative approaches described in this research to solve network challenges in both the wide area and data center networks.”

A10 Lightning ADS provides operations with a new level of Flex IT. See the picture below to see how the solution works.

Facilitate App Teams While Gaining Visibility

With Flex IT, Lightning ADS enables:

Easy onboarding for each app team with its own A10 Lightning ADC.

Application lifecycles are accelerating, with some apps updated multiple times per day. Use the centrally managed A10 Lightning Controller to address the change management of a single app without affecting other apps. It’s easy to onboard each app team with its own A10 Lightning ADC.

Application visibility.

Currently, operations teams might have access to only a fraction of private cloud applications and zero visibility into applications on public clouds such as AWS. A10 Lightning ADS provides visibility into apps on public clouds, private clouds and hybrid clouds—while providing the flexibility to enable application services such as load balancing, application security and policy-based URL redirection.

Application continuous deployment.

Until now, the only way to know how an updated application will perform against live traffic has been to upgrade the live production servers with the new app version. That’s scary, and risky. A10 Lightning ADS enables testing new versions of an application against actual traffic, then gradually steers a portion of traffic from the old to the new versions of the application. Once the upgraded application is performing as intended, 100 percent of traffic can be moved to the new app version. Improved application visibility makes it easier to find unexpected anomalies and rollback to stable versions if needed.

Summary

Technology advances such as active-active load balancing, and cloud economics are the foundation for A10 Lightning ADS and for addressing Flex IT requirements. Application teams are able to embrace micro-services architectures, containers, continuous development processes and other innovations that reduce application development time and improve agility. At the same time, IT operations teams gain the visibility and control over the entire portfolio of applications. Central IT can define, deploy and enforce consistent policies for high availability, scalability and security across applications with only a fraction of the personnel and computing resources of legacy application delivery solutions.

A10 Lightning ADS offers a cloud-native foundation for continuing application delivery innovation. It offers unified application delivery services across load balancing, application security, continuous deployment and visibility. With vendor-agnostic support for private, public and hybrid cloud environments, programmability and support for DevOps processes, A10 Lightning ADS is leading the way for Flex IT and changing how cloud applications are developed, deployed and managed.



Andrew Hickey
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May 16, 2015

Andrew Hickey served as A10's editorial director. Andrew has two decades of journalism and content strategy experience, covering everything from crime to cloud computing and all things in… Read More