Guest blog alert! We’re excited to haveTakahiroMitsuhata, Sr. Manager of Technical Marketing,from our partner atA10 Networksjoining us in the blogosphere today to talk about theirupcomingOktoberTekfestwebinar, “Leveraging the Benefits of Multi-cloud Architecture.”Hewill be joined by Paul Nicholson, Sr. Director of Product Marketing for the webinar.Mitsuhatabrings 15 years of experience in security and networking, with a focus on DDoS protection and application networking. Taka is responsible for the Technical Marketing function of A10 Networks, San Jose, Calif. This company provides solutions to customers ranging in size from service providers to enterprises.
Their webinar session will be live at ourTekfestLearning Center on October 1st. Get a glimpse of all you can learn in their blog below and don’t forget toregister forOktoberTekfest!There is no question that multicloud application deployments now play a foundational role in everything from internal business needs to digital transformation initiatives — but it’s also essential for IT operators to ensure effective visibility, governance, security, and control across both public cloudsorprivate cloudsasmulticlouddeployments mature into standard IT and operational realms.
MulticloudComplexity: The Fact
A global survey by the Business Performance Innovation Network (BPI Network) on current state and future direction for multi-cloud deployments found that most organizations face major challenges in ensuring security across all cloud environments. They also face challenges in operatingmulticloudinfrastructures with limited IP resources and expertise and improving service visibility and operation efficiency in such complexmulticloudenvironments where all resources and data are distributed across all clouds.
Companies cannot afford to ignore security implications as they leverage multicloudstrategy in order to offer better services to their customers. There are many security issues that arise, including creeping complexity, nonexistent cross-platform visibility and different security standards for each vendor’s platform. As a result, most companies end up in a more complexmulticloudsetup than they had envisaged.
What is aPolynimbusApplication Delivery Controller (ADC)?
Polynimbus refers to the operation of an enterprise on multiple public or private clouds. The Polynimbus Secure Application Services blueprint describes the new multicloud operational reality. It allows for greater availability, consistency in security, manageability, and greater simplicity for organizations as they deal with the multicloud world’s complexity. The blueprint can be adopted to reduce multicloud risk and operational challenges, improve compliance and accuracy, and meet SecOps and DevOps requirements with less stress on IT personnel.
The Benefits of Having an ADC inPolynimbusApplication Services
Anapplication delivery control (ADC), is a network device that front-ends the appliance servers and/or microservices. It has full visibility into application traffic and control.
Maximize Service Uptime
The core capability of the application delivery controller (ADC) is server load balancing. This distributes application traffic load among back-end servers and also provides efficient higher availability or redundancy in the event of a server failure. Operators can use the ADC’s traffic control capabilities to enable modern service deployment and operation, such as CI/CD processes or blue/green deployments that can avoid service interruptions during new service introductions or system maintenance for code updates.
Intelligent Traffic Management for GlobalMulticloudSites
Global server load balancing (GSLB), which uses DNS proxy technology to control application traffic worldwide, uses DNS proxy technology. A GSLB-enabled ADC can intelligently manage and distribute application requests across all sites/clouds and automatically failover to another site in the event of a failure. Operators can use geo-location awareness to provide content localization and control traffic and data processing for security compliance and GDPR.
Integrated Application Security
To protect application services, it makes sense to turn security features on an ADC (application delivery controller) on. Operators can easily enable service protection without having to make any changes to application servers. Web application firewall, application access management and control, DDoS protection, and so forth are some of the security features.
In a microservices architecture, each Node is a very small footprint that focuses on a specific function (e.g. web service with specific data only) with little or no security concept. ADCs can be equipped with security features to protect against unauthorised access and data encryption.
The consolidation of security functions into network functions simplifies network design and operation. This is true for both IT operators and security teams.
Consolidated Application Service Traffic Visibility
In amulticloudenvironment, where all the resources are distributed globally, it would be difficult for operators to gain a good understanding of the entire application service quality and status. It is crucial to have consolidated, deeper service visibility and analytics from both a business and OPEX planning standpoint. Service monitoring and early detection will greatly benefit from the ability to track service status and quality, such as latency or response times.