Use Application Delivery Technologies to Accelerate and Automate the Boring Tasks


Playing a stringed musical instrument like a guitar means that the different strings need to be regularly adjusted to play the correct note. Guitar players tightened and loosened the strings to tune the guitar. The strings were tuned by ear, which meant that the person tuning the guitar had to know what sound each string had to make with considerable accuracy.

With modern technology, there are tuners that can generate tones so one no longer needs to know exactly what each note sounds like. And, today, there are tuners that will automatically adjust the tension in the string to create the right tone with no human intervention. This is a great benefit for guitar players because they like to play music, and not spend a lot of time and effort tuning their instrument every time they wanted to play.

Positioned to accelerate

Application delivery controllers (ADC) can act as that automatic guitar tuner for application delivery. They are load balancers with advanced complementary features. These features are available because the ADC acts as a reverse proxy on behalf of the application and manages the connections and content within each connection. One of these benefits is to analyze the content and automatically adapt it to optimize the application performance based on the user’s expectations to deliver an improved quality of experience (QoE).

For the most common protocols, HTTP and HTTPS (web content), this means that the ADC has the ability to understand the user requirements. These requirements can vary based on operating system (Windows, MacOS, Linux), browser type (Edge, Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome), device type (mobile phone, tablet, laptop, desktop PC), and connection method (4G/LTE, 3G, DSL, cable, satellite). These variables can change how web content needs to be presented to deliver the best experience in terms of latency, page load times, and visual experience.

[You might also like: Application Virtualization – Seeing the Forest Instead of Trees]

Program and automate

The ADC can use programmed intelligence to adjust the application content by reordering components of the page to display the most relevant pieces first, adjust image size to provide a satisfactory visual experience while minimizing bandwidth consumption, and consolidate libraries and code to prevent the sending of duplicate content. If programmed with the appropriate intelligence, the ADC can even send content that is needed later while the user is viewing the content to make efficient use of the connection bandwidth and availability.

For example, a user may be browsing an e-commerce site on their mobile device. The ADC can reorder the delivery of the content so that the user can start viewing products while other images and components that are further down the page and not within the display are loaded later. These images will be adjusted in size to display within the mobile device’s small screen to keep data consumption at a minimum. Since it is likely that if products are selected that the user will go to a checkout page to order the items, the shopping cart and checkout components of the website can be loaded while the user is browsing the site.

Enjoy

All this can be done dynamically and automatically based on the above parameters that are identified by the ADC. The advantage of having the ADC do all of this work is that, like the guitar player, the application developer can focus on doing the things that they like to do and are good at – making cool web content. The optimization of the web content for all of the permutations of these variables is endless and unsatisfying work.

Leverage ADC technologies and their position within the application delivery infrastructure to offload all of the menial tasks to the technology and let the human elements of the business focus on the tasks that they are good at and, more importantly, enjoy.

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Read “Keep It Simple; Make It Scalable: 6 Characteristics of the Futureproof Load Balancer” to learn more.

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Frank Yue

Frank Yue is Director of Solution Marketing, Application Delivery for Radware. In this role, he is responsible for evangelizing Radware technologies and products before they come to market. He also writes blogs, produces white papers, and speaks at conferences and events related to application networking technologies. Mr. Yue has over 20 years of experience building large-scale networks and working with high performance application technologies including deep packet inspection, network security, and application delivery. Prior to joining Radware, Mr. Yue was at F5 Networks, covering their global service provider messaging. He has a degree in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania.

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