In the changing world of micro-service applications, agile approach, continuous delivery and integration, and the migration of applications and service to the cloud, ADCs (aka load balancers) are likewise transforming.

ADCs still make applications and services available–locally or globally, within and across cloud and data centers–while providing redundancy to links and reducing latency for the consumers of application services. However, due to where ADCs sit in the network, they have taken on additional roles of a security choreographer and a single point of visibility across the front-end, networks and applications.

Traditionally deployed as a redundant pair of physical devices, ADCs have begun to be deployed as virtual appliances. Now, as applications move to the cloud, ADCs are available as a service in the cloud or as a mix of virtual, cloud and physical devices depending on cost and performance characteristics desired.

Core Use Cases

Providing high availability (HA) is one of the core use cases for an ADC. HA addresses the need for an application to recover from failures within and between data centers. SSL offload is also a core use case. As SSL/TLS become pervasive to secure and protect web transactions, offloading non-business functions from application and web servers is needed to reduce application latency while lowering the cost of application footprint required to serve users.

[You may also like: Application Delivery Use Cases for Cloud and On-Premise Applications]

One of the ways organizations use cloud and automation to optimize the cost of their application infrastructure is by dynamically adjusting resource consumption to their actual utilization levels. As the number of users connecting to a particular application service grows, new instances of application services are brought online. Scaling-in and scaling-out in an automated way is one of the primary reasons why ADCs have built-in automation and integrations with orchestration systems. For example, Radware’s automation capabilities enhance and extend Microsoft Azure by taking advantage of Scale Sets to automatically grow and shrink the ADC cluster based on demand.

Automating Operations

Auto scale capability is important for organizations looking to automate operations – that is to add and remove services on demand without manual intervention for licensing and to reclaim capacity when no longer in-use. This saves costs, both in operations and well as in training. As organizations move to the cloud, capacity planning and associated licensing are common concerns. Elastic licensing is directed to cap the cost of licenses as organizations transition from physical hardware or virtual deployment to cloud.

[You may also like: Economics of Load Balancing When Transitioning to the Cloud]

Innovative elastic licensing benefits small and large enterprises, and enables then to protect against load balancing pricing shocks as the numbers of users and associated SSL transactions grow, while simplifying capacity planning. End-to-end visibility and automation further enable self-service across various stakeholders and reduce errors.