Application delivery controllers (ADCs) have become an essential part of business-critical applications.
ADCs manage fast-changing transaction loads, while enhancing performance, resilience and security, says Brent Lees, senior product manager at Riverbed Technology.
According to Lees, enabling businesses to manage their application delivery infrastructure using an 'ADC-as-a-service' model enhances the customer experience and can translate into service agility, as well as time-to-market improvements. "However, many online applications change frequently to reflect customer requirements, and the increasing speed of change in application deployment means that traditional ADC architectures can hold back the pace of change."
For Lees, static legacy application delivery infrastructures are limiting enterprises that are looking to roll out private clouds.
"These are a bottleneck in virtualised data centres and cloud environments, hampering IT's ability to orchestrate and manage their application delivery services," he says, adding that moving to an on-demand platform for application delivery 'ADC-as-a-service' will provide the tools and technology to deploy and manage a dynamic and elastic application delivery infrastructure.
ADC-as-a-service delivers better ROI through a usage-based business model, says Lees, going on to say that enterprises should be able to provide infrastructure with increased flexibility and agility.
"ADC-as-a-service enables customers to have their demand for additional capacity or advanced services met at any time. In addition, they benefit from an enriched user experienced with per-application tuning."
According to Lees, ADC-as-a-service is a compelling proposition today. "Implemented and rolled out correctly, ADC-as-a-service enables any cloud provider to automatically provision, deploy, license and meter application delivery services and resources anywhere in their network, data centre or end-user premises." He adds that ADC-as-a-service allows organisations to improve management and automation across the data centre, enabling improved resource utilisation and a more dynamic and flexible environment.
He cites elasticity as one of the most compelling reasons for moving to the cloud. "IT resources can automatically scale up and down as required by the business." Running applications from an enterprise-grade cloud reduces the cost of complex and expensive hardware and in the cloud, developers can move to a more agile development process, with the opportunity to test new ideas more quickly and address issues before the application has been moved to production.
"Applications undergo constant evolution, and there is a clear trend towards rapid development, with development teams and applications distributed processing across multiple locations," Lees concludes.
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