From Zero to Fully Provisioned Application in Minutes – Part 2

A couple of weeks ago, I published an article in which we discussed how we can shorten the time it takes to roll out a new application.

We outlined the following steps of an application rollout:

1. Purchase servers and allocate storage
2. Purchase Application Delivery Controller (ADC)
3. Configure network and rack ADC
4. ADC configuration research
5. Configure ADC
6. Application pre-production testing
7. Move from testing to production

And we focused and discussed steps 1 through 3.

In this 2nd part of the article I would like to focus on steps 4 through 7, and specifically on steps 4 and 5. Imagine you want to roll out a new load balancer SharePoint application. Once you setup the different application tiers; it is time to configure the ADC. If you have a TIG (testing and integration guide) for deploying a SharePoint application then you are one step closer to configuring the ADC, but you still need to read through the guide and research the configuration, then you configure the required settings, and lastly you validate them compared to the guide, etc – this takes time and is prone to errors.

Well we have a solution called AppShape templates, which removes all of these issues and steps, no more is there a need for the ADC configuration research or manual configuration of the ADC.
We took the different application TIGs we have and converted them into smart templates, which can be easily deployed onto our ADC or vADC services. These templates have been tested to ensure 100% accuracy of the configuration and they really shorten the deployment time. All the user has to do is provide the relevant IP addresses for the VIP, servers, etc, and the templates contains all the rest of the required configuration information.

After the deployment is done, users can then monitor the behavior of the deployed services as well as generate reports, all in the prism of an AppShape template.

But there is more, when we deploy these AppShape templates on a vADC instance on our ADC-VX product we also allow defining capacity information as part of the template. This offers the opportunity to define exactly how much throughput this application should consume. It also allows migrating the template, including the capacity information, to a neighboring ADC-VX unit where there is free capacity.

Once both the application and ADC are deployed and configured, it is time for steps 6 and 7, namely the pre-production and production testing. Previously these 2 steps had very little in common as the two testing environments were duplicates and required manual configuration in each environment.

Using Radware’s vADC migration tool, IT managers no longer need to manually configure the ADCs in both environments. They can configure the pre-production vADC instance, perform all the required testing and then migrate the vADC itself into the production environment, thus ensuring the production ADC’s configuration is exactly the one tested in the pre-production environment.

So to summarize, by employing server, storage and Radware’s ADC virtualization technologies, IT managers can greatly shorten application roll out times while raising the configuration accuracy levels.

Regards,
Eitan Bremler