Developers are facing challenges on a daily basis with applications going offline and being unavailable or application performance issues.
This is according to Desmond Pillay, country manager of Kemp Technologies SA, who notes this puts app developers under serious pressure to ensure they get their applications online and available as soon as possible.
Pillay says application delivery controllers or server load balancers, allow developers to overcome these normal day-to-day application availability and application performance issues by automatically ensuring their applications are highly available and scalable.
He points out a server load balancer forms a resource layer between the users accessing the application and the application servers. "The load balancer performs an intelligent health checks on the application layer to ensure the user request is directed to the best performing server.
"If the application or server is unavailable, the users are automatically redirected to the next best available server by the load balancer."
This frees up the IT developers time to attend to their normal day-to-day job functions, instead of performing "fire-fighting" when a business critical service application is unavailable, says Pillay.
According to Pillay, emerging markets have an opportunity to invest in this technology to power up operations, leverage resources like the cloud and acquire the flexibility and agility required to be competitive.
Peter Melerud, executive VP of Kemp Technologies, says this flexibility and choice is a powerful enabler for emerging markets throughout Africa. "We speak of adding value to the growing domestic application delivery controller market and operators that are investing into DevOps - which is a game-changer for businesses in competitive niche segments."
However, South African developers are not making adequate investment in load balancing technology, which can greatly benefit them, says Melerud.
There are several challenges in SA and emerging markets, but the primary ones are cost, local support, return on investment and the direct and indirect value a business gets by investing in this type of technology.
Developers in SA and other emerging markets need to be more aware of how application load balancing technologies can increase the performance, uptime, and scalability of their applications, he adds.
"Once they see the benefits of using load balancers in their application workloads, more of them will implement these types of technologies."
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