Agile, DevOps and Load Balancers: Evolution of Network Operations


Many organizations have a guidance to cut IT spending while rolling out secure application services in a continuous delivery model. Many R&D teams in these organizations have adopted Agile and DevOps practices to enable faster delivery. The goal of Agile and DevOps practices is to deliver applications quicker and to deploy them with a lower failure rate than traditional approaches.

As cyber threats force organizations to tighten security within their datacenters and applications; delivering advanced and secure application services quickly and cost effectively poses a challenge to IT teams. Cross-domain web-enabled services that span networking, application and security require collaboration across teams, often creating conflicts and delays in the testing and provisioning. The virtualization of the data center and transition to the cloud brings additional complexity in managing and maintaining appliances and applications.

Even more difficult is the learning curve across these different domains. Rolling out new services that are secure and high-performance requires deep IT expertise and familiarity with quirks of various systems.

Automation, Orchestration and API Gateways to the rescue

Automation: These tools transform the traditional manual approach into simpler automated scripts and tasks that do not require familiarity or expertise with the managed solution. The automation of the tasks through templates, preconfigured and automated tools such as Ansible, Chef and Puppet eliminates the potential for human error in the management and deployment of these solutions. Additionally, many products may provide built-in tools that enable out-of-the-box integration without requiring external tools.

[You might also like: Future-proof your Cisco ACE refresh]

Orchestration: Out-of-the-box integration with orchestration tools such as VMware vRealize Orchestrator, Cisco ACI, and Ansible allow IT teams to reduce learning curve to managing new devices from the tools they have expertise.

API Gateways: Deploying application delivery or security services can be a complex task and requires dedicated resources that are familiar with the specific ADC or security solution. With API Gateways, IT personnel build custom integrations that can provision, decommission, configure and manage complex application delivery and security services (physical and virtual) in a matter of minutes.

Conclusion

Businesses have to support complex IT architectures for their application delivery. Configuring, deploying and maintaining these cross-domain services can be error-prone, costly and time-consuming. To simplify configuration and management of these application services, IT should adopt automation and orchestration that fit in with their agile and DevOps practices. The standardization of the advanced tasks via templates and scripts enables organizations to deliver complex services faster and more efficiently.

For additional details:
vDirect: https://www.radware.com/Products/vDirect/
Operator Toolbox: https://www.radware.com/operator-toolbox/ 

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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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Prakash Sinha

Prakash Sinha is a technology executive and evangelist for Radware and brings over 29 years of experience in strategy, product management, product marketing and engineering. Prakash has been a part of executive teams of four software and network infrastructure startups, all of which were acquired. Before Radware, Prakash led product management for Citrix NetScaler and was instrumental in introducing multi-tenant and virtualized NetScaler product lines to market. Prior to Citrix, Prakash held leadership positions in architecture, engineering, and product management at leading technology companies such as Cisco, Informatica, and Tandem Computers. Prakash holds a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering from BIT, Mesra and an MBA from Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

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