AVIn A Well Balanced Time...

Me and Load-Balancers (the artist wot became known as the Application Delivery Controller at some point in its life, even though it always did this anyway) go back a long way; 20 years basically, when “cloud” was merely a snowflake in the natural world of IT.

Think Alteon and Arrowpoint – kind of wild-west country where L-Bs were concerned; inventing concepts such as reverse proxy, sticky cookies (I wonder if Cadbury as was ever invested in this tech?) and global, load-balanced content delivery systems (actually created the world’s first in our old labs).

One issue with the classic, H/W-based solutions was that, eventually they ran out of silicon puff and had to be re-engineered, ground up. This was great for repeat test work but patently (pun there?) not the future. Fast forward to the cloud era and meeting with AVI Networks at IP Expo in the culture desert that is EXCEL in East London, and the tech has most definitely been brought bang up to date. Instead of investing “X” in an L-B solution (well, X+Y as companies always wanted a redundant stack) and then trying to get your $$$ wotsits out of it, the idea here is what AVI flashily (well someone has to employ marketeers) calls Intent-Based Application Services (IBAS). In English, a business works out what it needs in terms of handling its traffic requirements/SLAs etc and then auto-provisioning takes over, scaling up or down as necessary to handle volume efficiently. Common Sense as a Service…

AVI is rightly aiming high with this solution; multi-cloud environments, xSPS, Times Fortune Top 500 or whatever it’s called, but essentially those whose need is greatest and loss is most painful. Talk with AVIs David Moss, whose CV is almost a mapping of my vendor clients since the early 90s, did turn to how an AVI-Lite might be achievable, so watch this space on that one. Suffice to say, L-B/ADC is alive and well in the cloud era. The snowflakes have melted long ago…