STRAIGHT TALK7 CONSIDERATIONS TO FUTURE-PROOF YOUR LOAD BALANCING STRATEGY

100% SOFTWARE

APPLICATIONVISIBILITY

SECURITYINSIGHTS

ANY DATA CENTEROR CLOUD

PREDICTIVEAUTOSCALING

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Software-defined architectures have transformed enterprises to become more application-centric. With application owners seeking public-cloud-like simplicity and flexibility in their own data centers, IT teams are under pressure to reduce wait times to provision applications.

Legacy load balancing solutions force network architects and administrators to purchase new hardware, manually configure virtual services, and inefficiently overprovision these appliances. Simultaneously, new infrastructure choices are also enabling applications to be re-architected into autonomous microservices from monolithic or n-tier constructs. These transformations are forcing organizations to rethink load balancing strategies and application delivery controllers (ADCs) in their infrastructure.

7 REQUIREMENTS FOR MODERN-DAY LOAD BALANCERS Legacy load balancers and Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) were not

designed for an era of a software-defined infrastructure, virtualization and cloud-based applications. Look for the following before buying your next ADC.

7 Considerations to Future-proof Your Load Balancing Strategy

Admin Console Avi Controller

Rest APIAvi Service Engines(Distributed Load Balan

End Users

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Avi Networks — An Introduction

AVI VANTAGE PLATFORMAvi Vantage Platform, by Avi Networks, is built on software-defined principles and architected to mirror the agility of next generation data centers and DevOps practices. Avi Vantage uses a distributed architecture – a centralized Avi Controller and distributed Avi Service Engines (load balancers) that run on commodity x86 servers. Avi Service Engines communicate the real-time application telemetry to the Avi Controller, which then analyzes the data to provide visibility to applications and actionable insights on performance, security, and end user behavior to administrators. Avi Controller provides central management of a distributed pool of load balancing resources and predictively autoscales load balancers, as well as applications.

Avi Networks delivers flexible application services beyond load balancing, including application analytics, predictive autoscaling, micro-segmentation, and IT self-service for private data centers or the public cloud.

Before you commit to a multi-year license and maintenance contract, consider these key questions and what they will mean for the future of application services in your enterprise.

7 QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER BEFORE YOUR NEXT LOAD BALANCER PURCHASE

Avi ControllerApp Developers

Rest API

RestAPI

DEV PRODTEST

IT Admin Avi Console

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THE LEGACY APPROACH Typically, application teams submit an IT support ticket requesting their network administrators to set up additional VIPs to handle new or updated applications. The disadvantage to this approach is that administrators need to order additional hardware and manually provision application services– a process which could take weeks or months. Often times they also end up over-provisioning their ADC capacity just to account for infrequent peak usage times.

HOW AVI NETWORKS ENABLES SELF-SERVICE The Avi Controller is a single point of management and automation for administrators to quickly provision the capacity required by their applications. With the Avi Vantage Platform, developers and application owners can automate capacity provisioning by building in services through a 100% REST API-driven model. Avi Vantage enables administrators to provide policy-based access to the console for application owners for troubleshooting and monitoring, and to integrate the platform with their own orchestration services.

Application owners and DevOps teams cannot wait several weeks for application services to become available. Despite several automation or private cloud initiatives, and adoption of agile application development models, legacy ADCs force application developers to “hurry up and wait”. Avi Networks can help transition services from managed to self-service.

Can I enable self-service provisioning with my ADC solution?

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Self-service provisioning with Avi Vantage

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Real Time Telemetry

Autoscale Loadbalancers

AppAutoscale

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App Orchestration

Platform

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Can I elastically scale my load balancers and my application servers?

THE LEGACY APPROACH With no visibility into the application usage patterns and performance analytics, legacy ADCs force organizations to overcompensate for capacity. Development teams that have optimized for DevOps principles and continuous delivery goals, are forced to submit IT support tickets to the networking team to provision additional VIPs to rollout applications and updates.

HOW AVI NETWORKS ENABLES AUTOSCALING Avi Vantage uses the distributed data plane components (Avi Service Engines) to collect telemetry from application traffic flows across the entire deployment. This data is analyzed by the Avi Controller to generate intuitive application performance and security dashboards for administrators. The data enables administrators to define preset thresholds that trigger autoscaling of load balancers and/or application servers. The Avi Controller is a central repository for policies, and enables administrators to configure and manage autoscaling requirements.

Scalability is great, but elasticity is ideal. Today’s enterprises are challenged with understanding and planning for peak usage times, with the ability to scale down when demand recedes. Avi Networks gives you the ability to autoscale to meet your elasticity needs.

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Configuring autoscale policy with Avi Vantage

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THE LEGACY APPROACH Legacy ADC solutions force organizations to procure proprietary and expensive hardware-based appliances in order to meet evolving application needs and to improve SLAs to internal customers. This not only increases their TCO but also prevents them from supporting on-premises and cloud deployments with a uniform approach. Multitenancy also forces administrators to take down services for all tenants in order to maintain or upgrade just one of them.

HOW AVI NETWORKS DELIVERS HIGH PERFORMANCE AND LOWERS TCO The Avi Vantage Platform can deliver a terabit class load balancer with its software-defined approach to application services. The solution provides a software-only approach, and can be deployed on bare metal servers, VMs, or containers in private data centers or public clouds. Avi Vantage spins up new load balancers and VIPs in a matter of seconds and eliminates cumbersome manual processes to provision new applications. With policy-based triggers for predictive autoscaling of load balancers, the platform scales in and out elastically on commodity x86 hardware. The platform also enables the deployment of scalable application services down to the level of individual applications (per app load balancers), and supports multitenancy natively. In addition, enterprises are able to provision application services programmatically using REST APIs for development and test use cases without the need to purchase additional hardware.

Do I need hardware-based appliances to meet performance requirements?

The need to support on-premises and multi-cloud deployments means that enterprises need to choose application services that work consistently across different environments. Avi Vantage Platform helps enterprises meet performance SLAs while lowering TCO.

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Proprietary Hardware Commodity x86 Servers

Large Capex Subscription-Based Opex

Overprovisioned Predictive Elasticity

Monolithic, North/South Use Cases Only

Distributed, North/South and East/West Use Cases

LEGACY AVIAppliance-Based 100% Software

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Better performance per dollar with Avi Vantage

App Telemetry

Avi Controller Distributed Load BalancersCollect L4-L7 Insights

End Users

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Can I get real-time insights and visibility into application traffic?

Agile enterprises need to troubleshoot application issues as soon as they occur, though getting to the bottom of application performance and latency issues can sometimes take several hours or days. Avi’s next generation, software-defined ADC is uniquely positioned to address these challenges.

THE LEGACY APPROACH ADCs have always held a strategic position in the network–inline with traffic flow, which offers the opportunity to collect and analyze application data. However, legacy ADCs have not been able to take advantage of this location privilege to provide actionable insights to application performance or security.

HOW AVI NETWORKS PROVIDES APPLICATION VISIBILITY AND INSIGHTS The Avi Vantage Platform is uniquely architected to deliver unprecedented analytics on application performance, security, and end users. The Avi Service Engines collect real-time application telemetry, which is analyzed by the Avi Controller to provide insights into each transaction and end user access patterns. The platform includes the capability to “record and replay” traffic events in an intuitive dashboard, enabling administrators to troubleshoot application issues in a matter of minutes.

4 Deep Insights into Application Traffic with Avi Vantage

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THE LEGACY APPROACH Appliance-based ADC solutions do not offer centralized management and control, causing administrators to spend significant time and effort managing the complexity of disparate appliances. While ADC security features have improved over time, legacy solutions still cannot offer a simple way to understand the application’s security posture at a glance, and do not work across multiple data center or cloud environments.

HOW AVI NETWORKS ENABLES SECURITY Avi Vantage leverages the in-line location of ADC in the path of application traffic flow to collect real-time security and performance metrics. Each Avi Service Engine automatically provides continuous security insights by inspecting, informing and mitigating with closed loop analytics to prevent volumetric attacks such as DDoS. The Avi Controller receives the telemetry and analyzes the data to display security insights in the central administration console. The inspection module scans for configuration vulnerabilities, suspicious client interactions and cipher settings. These details are then summarized into health and security scores, alerts and events, syslog, email alerts, etc. to inform the administrators of attacks. Administrators can take mitigation actions either automatically (based on preset definitions) or manually with just one-click. Automated mitigation can be triggered by rate-limiting and temporarily blocking or blacklisting the traffic.

Does my ADC solution provide continuous security insights?

Many application vulnerabilities stem from incorrect access control policies or misconfigurations of application delivery controllers. Avi Vantage Platform enables security by delivering real-time metrics, while guarding against volumetric attacks such as Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS.

Assess and Score Security Posture Display Real-Time Insights

Continuous Inline Inspection

Avi Controller

Mitigate Threats In Real TimeAnalyze Transactions

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Continuous Security Insights with Avi Vantage

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Continuous Security Insights with Avi Vantage

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LEGACY ADC

App 1 App 2 App 3

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MULTITENANCY WITH AVI VANTAGE

App 1 App 2 App 3 App 4

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THE LEGACY APPROACH Legacy ADCs fuse control and service delivery into a single appliance. When IT deploys applications on these appliances it typically shares this infrastructure across multiple LoBs. To support this shared model, many leading appliance based ADCs provide some rudimentary form of multitenancy to isolate tenants. However, this model does not provide true resource redundancy - a single busy application could still hog resources to the detriment of others. System upgrades, workload movements, or the addition of new tenants could become disruptive events for all tenants.

HOW AVI ENABLES A SOFTWARE-DEFINED ENTERPRISE With a centralized control plane and a distributed data plane consisting of dedicated service delivery points, Avi Vantage enables clear separation of tenants without one application stepping on another application’s resources. Avi Vantage has transformed ADCs by delivering per-tenant, dedicated micro load balancers that deliver true multitenant application services.

Can I achieve true multitenancy, the software-defined way?

Large enterprises supporting multiple applications and groups on shared infrastructure often end up spending more than is necessary on lines of business (LoB). Avi Networks delivers a clear separation of tenants, without imposing on resources.

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Multitenancy with Avi Vantage

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THE LEGACY APPROACH In legacy ADC architecture, each load balancer is a distinct appliance that needs to be configured and managed individually. They do not offer native integration with private clouds and continue to require manual configurations and provisioning.

HOW AVI INTEGRATES WITH NEXT GEN DATA CENTER ARCHITECTURES The central controller in the Avi Vantage Platform, Avi Controller, is a single point of analysis and automation. Avi Vantage is built with complete REST APIs for all capabilities, thereby delivering a solution that integrates with the control points of third party private cloud platforms and orchestration tools.

This graphic compares the manual ADC creation and automated 30-second ADC creation process in a

legacy ADC architecture vs. Avi Vantage Platform.

Can I automate and integrate with OpenStack, VMware, AWS, SDN and Containers ?

As enterprises seek to automate IT operations and enable internal self-service to achieve cloud-like flexibility, ADCs must operate in a way that matches the automation of private cloud frameworks. Avi Networks makes this possible.

LEGACY ADC

Discover networks and backend servers

Identify network location for ADC

Manually configure network plumbing for ADC

Configure each ADC device

Provision Virtual IP (VIP) Select deployment options

Configure backend servers

Automated

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AVI APPROACH

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App Developers

Avi ControllerSingle point of management

and control

Self-service load balancers

IT Administrators

Rest API

Role-based policies

Cloud Connectors

Physical ADC Appliances Virtual ADC Appliances

“N” points of management and integration

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LEGACY APPROACH AVI APPROACH

The legacy ADC architecture also complicates the integration of any number of load balancers with a cloud management platform, automation tools, orchestration tools, etc. in the organization’s current environment. Legacy ADC’s complexity vs. Avi’s simplicity is clearly illustrated in the following graphic:

Automation and Integrations with Avi Vantage

Advances in computing and infrastructure choices, ranging from private and public clouds to software-defined data centers and orchestration tools, are helping enterprises automate IT operations, and use DevOps practices to become application-centric. However, traditional ADC appliances are simply not effective in meeting the needs of dynamic enterprises. It is time to look at agile choices for application services and demand more from ADCs. Learn more about software-defined application services and how the Avi Vantage Platform can help future-proof more than just your load balancing strategy.

ABOUT AVI NETWORKS Avi Networks delivers public-cloud-like agility for application services beyond load balancing including deep application analytics, predictive autoscaling, and security in the data center or public cloud. The Avi Vantage Platform delivers elastic, software-defined application services on commodity x86 servers, VMs, or containers. Avi Vantage provides application services as a dynamic pool of resources that matches the automation needs of private or public cloud initiatives. Fortune 500 technology, media, and financial services companies use Avi Networks to accelerate application delivery, enable self-service for application owners, and lower their TCO. avinetworks.com • info@avinetworks.com