Alteon Automation Made Easy with Cyber Controller
In our previous blog post, we talked about the difficulties that IT managers face in today’s world, especially when it comes to managing the Application Delivery lifecycle. This is the process of developing, testing, deploying, and maintaining applications that run on Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs). We also explained how using automation tools can help IT managers to manage this lifecycle more efficiently and effectively. In this blog post, we will explore the different automation tools that you can use to manage the lifecycle of Alteon ADCs from RCyber Controller.
Radware’s Cyber Controller is a platform that allows you to monitor and control multiple Alteon ADCs from a single interface. It provides a versatile set of automation capabilities starting with built-in productivity features that streamline ongoing administrative tasks and allows users to cost-effectively automate the most complex ADC and security operational tasks.
Enhanced Lifecycle Management with Cyber Controller Automation Tools
Radware Cyber Controller is a unified solution for management, configuration, and reporting.
With Cyber Controller and its embedded Alteon automation tools, Radware customers can benefit from greater productivity while receiving the following benefits:
- Reliable and easy configuration of complex services
- Reduced application spin-up time
- Reduced capacity planning risk
- Error-proof configuration & maintenance tools
- Increased IT team productivity
Cyber Controller includes the following Alteon automation tools:
- Alteon Automation Engine
- Alteon Cluster Manager
Alteon Automation Engine
The Alteon Automation engine facilitates the efficient execution of complex operations, automates frequently recurring tasks, and minimizes manual errors and overhead associated with administrative tasks. It empowers you to utilize widely recognized and established languages, such as Ansible and Python, to execute configuration templates or operation workflows based on a shared repository in Cyber Controller.
Templates are predefined sets of configuration settings that you can apply to multiple instances and reuse as needed. Templates help you follow best practices and ensure compliance across the organization. By using templates, you can specify and enforce security settings, network configurations, and other relevant parameters in a consistent and systematic way. With Alteon Automation Ansible-based templates, you can perform tasks such as onboarding Alteon instances and deploying new applications in a standardized way, saving time and effort in managing complex environments. You do not need to be an expert in application delivery and security to manage complex and advanced services. You just need to know which template to use for a service to enable and update it. This way, you do not have to ask the subject matter experts (SME) and architects for help with configuration and management issues. This reduces the number of escalations and the total time spent and improves the operational efficiency of the IT organization.
A workflow is a script that automates more complex tasks that operators need to do often or regularly for service maintenance. Workflows let you run maintenance tasks that are tedious and time consuming with a single click. For instance, you can run a script that checks all the Alteon devices (physical and virtual) in the datacenter and makes sure they have the right configurations applied and saved. You can also set up automatic backups of the device’s configuration at regular intervals. You just need to select the workflow, the devices, and the schedule for the task. The task will run automatically and send you a report of its status. Another example is verifying that the SSL policies on Radware’s ADC security devices match the organization’s policies. You can also automate the validation of the SSL certificates across multiple devices. This saves you more than 95% of the time that you would normally spend on these tasks.
Alteon Automation revolutionizes the conventional manual service management approach by transforming it into an automated process that is managed through an intuitive UI. This UI does not require any familiarity or expertise with managed solutions. The expertise and knowledge to manage advanced ADC services are built into the templates and workflows available through this easy-to-use UI.
For instance, when an operator executes a template that deploys a new instance of a service or application, they are guided, via a graphical interface, to provide the unique parameters of the service, such as IP address, server IP, and SSL key. The bulk of the service configuration is standardized based on application and business requirements by the creator of the template. All these standardized components are automatically added to the solution configuration.
This process simplifies and automates the delivery of application and security services, eliminating the potential for certain configuration steps to be forgotten or misconfigured. With the Alteon Automation tool, inconsistent application and security deployments become impossible as it removes manual variability from the process.
The automation engine enables customers to customize and create templates and workflows that suit their needs, in addition to the ones that are already provided for the most common tasks in application delivery. This way, customers can leverage the power of automation to streamline their processes and optimize their outcomes.
Alteon Cluster Manager (ACM)
As the internet continues to grow and evolve, so does the demand for high-performance and reliable application delivery controllers (ADCs). However, a single ADC may not be enough to handle the increasing traffic and complexity of modern web applications. That is why many organizations are opting for clusters of ADCs, which are groups of ADCs that work together to provide load balancing, redundancy, and fault tolerance. Auto-scaling clusters, which are clusters that can automatically adjust the number of instances based on the workload, optimize the performance, availability, and cost-efficiency. Auto-scaling ADC clusters can offer several benefits, such as:
Planned and unplanned surges: Clusters of ADCs can handle sudden spikes in traffic, whether they are caused by planned events (such as product launches, promotions, or seasonal peaks) or unplanned events (such as cyberattacks, network failures, or natural disasters), without the need of human intervention. Auto-scaling ADC clusters automatically provision additional instances to handle the extra load, preventing overloading, downtime, or service degradation.
Gradual growth: Clusters of ADCs can scale up or down as needed, without disrupting the existing traffic or configuration. This allows organizations to add or remove ADCs as their traffic patterns change over time, without affecting the performance or availability of their applications.
High availability: Clusters of ADCs can ensure that applications are always accessible, even if one or more ADCs fail, as traffic is automatically distributed only to the healthy instances. Auto-scaling clusters can also heal themselves in case an instance has failed by spinning up an instance to replace it. This minimizes the impact of failures and improves the resilience and reliability of applications.
The Cyber Controller Cluster Management tool automates the provisioning and management of auto-scaling Alteon clusters on the VMware cloud. It carries out the following functions:
Cluster provisioning: It provisions the Alteon instances required for the cluster on the VMware cloud.
Cluster scale out/in: It tracks the resource usage (CPU, throughput, etc.) of the cluster members and, based on the user-defined thresholds, triggers a scale-out or scale-in event.
A scale-out event is triggered when another Alteon instance is required to handle the traffic (parameters are over user-defined scale-out thresholds). ACM provisions the new instance, synchronizes its configuration to the rest of the cluster and registers it in Cyber Controller as part of the cluster.
A scale-in event is triggered when less Alteon instances are required in order to handle the traffic (parameters are under user-defined scale-in thresholds). ACM decommissions an instance and removes it from Cyber Controller cluster inventory.
Automating the provisioning and management of Alteon clusters reduces the operational complexity and human errors that can occur when configuring and maintaining multiple load balancers and enhances the scalability and availability of the clusters by allowing dynamic adjustment of resources and parameters based on the workload and performance requirements.
Conclusion
In this blog post, we have explored how Radware’s Cyber Controller, and its embedded Alteon automation tools can help IT managers to manage the Application Delivery lifecycle more efficiently and effectively. By using Cyber Controller and its Alteon automation tools, you can benefit from greater productivity, reduced application spin-up time, error-proof configuration and maintenance, reliable and easy configuration of complex services, increased IT team productivity, and reduced capacity planning risk.
To learn more about how Radware can help your organization, contact us here.
