Cloud computing brings cost efficiency and deployment flexibility to applications. These advantages are driving the demand for cloud-enabled applications. The move to the cloud raises concerns for service levels such as availability, security, and on-demand scalability for the applications.
For many years, application delivery controllers (ADCs) have been integral to addressing service level needs for enterprise applications deployed on premise. As data centers consolidate, end users connect remotely from a variety of locations with varied devices. Many enterprise applications are typically not designed out of the box to meet today’s quality of experience (QoE) needs.
Many cloud providers now offer basic load balancing services to applications that are hosted on their own platforms. In addition to lacking many advanced application delivery capabilities typically available to on premise applications, native cloud load balancing is particularly challenged in supporting customers migrating enterprise applications to a cloud infrastructure and those who need to continue to support on premise applications.
One of the challenges is to ensure the same quality of experience to multiple applications whether on premise or in the cloud. Beyond the basic load balancing, enterprises must ensure performance consistency; provide isolation to business-critical applications from failures in other services; and simplify load balancing service provisioning seamlessly regardless of where the application service is deployed.
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In cloud environments where tenants share the application delivery resources, a potential spike in resource consumption due to a misconfiguration of a tenant may impact other tenants, severely impacting an application’s QoE or its availability.
Another challenge is the need to quickly roll-out new application delivery services. With different tenants deploying applications and consuming resources differently, pre-allocating compute resources for each tenant is inefficient. Additionally, the tenant onboarding must be streamlined to eliminate manually defining service profile from scratch.
The ability to enable advanced application delivery functionality as a service offering is valuable in not only creating revenue streams and building differentiated solutions for a cloud service provider, but also important for organizations considering hybrid approach while looking to streamlining onboarding and management of application delivery services.
For more information:
Load Balancing and Application Delivery as a Service
Cloud Load Balancer Solutions For Private/Hybrid Clouds
