Many enterprises are in transition to the cloud, either building their own private cloud, managing a hybrid environment – both physical and virtualized—or deploying on a public cloud. In addition, there is a shift from infrastructure-centric environments to application-centric ones. In a fluid development environment of continuous integration and continuous delivery, where services are frequently added or updated, the new paradigm requires support for needs across multiple environments and across many stakeholders.
When development teams choose unsupported cloud infrastructure without IT involvement, the network team loses visibility, and security and cost control is accountable over the service level agreement (SLA) provided once the developed application goes live.
The world is changing. So should your application delivery controller.
Application delivery and load balancing technologies have been the strategic component providing availability, optimization, security and latency reduction for applications. In order to enable seamless migration of business critical applications to the cloud, the same load balancing and application delivery infrastructure must now address the needs of continuous delivery/integration, hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.
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The objective here is not to block agile development and use of innovative services, but to have a controlled environment, which gives the organization the best of both DevOps and IT– that is, to keep a secure and controlled environment while enabling agility. The benefits speak for themselves:
Reduced shadow IT initiatives
To remain competitive, every business needs innovative technology consumable by the end‐user. Oftentimes, employees are driven to use shadow IT services because going through approval processes is cumbersome, and using available approved technology is complex to learn and use. If users cannot get quick service from IT, they will go to a cloud service provider for what they need. Sometimes this results in short‐term benefit, but may cause issues with organizations’ security, cost controls and visibility in the long-term. Automation and self-service address CI/CD demands and reduce the need for applications teams to acquire and use their own unsupported ADCs.
Flexibility and investment protection at a predictable cost
Flexible licensing is one of the critical elements to consider. As you move application delivery services and instances to the cloud when needed, you should be able to reuse existing licenses across a hybrid deployment. Many customers initially deploy on public cloud but cost unpredictability becomes an issue once the services scale with usage.
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Seamless integration with an SDDC ecosystem
As you move to private or public cloud, you should be able to reuse your investment in the orchestration system of your environment. Many developers are not used to networking or security nomenclature. Using self-service tools with which developers are familiar quickly becomes a requirement.
The journey from a physical data center to the cloud may sometimes require investments in new capabilities to enable migration to the new environment. If an application delivery controller capacity is no longer required in the physical data center, its capacity can be automatically reassigned. Automation and self-services applications address the needs of various stakeholders, as well as the flexible licensing and cost control aspects of this journey.
