Global, Load-Balanced Redundant Weather

I remember long ago, in an unlikely setting for a bleeding-edge test-labs – an old winery surrounded by vines where the only “blood” came from crushed grapes – yes, my old French test labs, where we created the world’s first globally load-balanced, server/content distribution system.

OK, so it was all simulated, but it worked. I won’t reveal the vendor concerned, but it never went into production as tested – ahead of its time? And why didn’t I copyright it????

Fast forward well over a decade and we have a similar situation regarding the cloudy IT scenario. Why have one cloud when you can have several? Then if one turns black you still have another with a silver lining… But then how do you load-balance them? Not even Carol Kirkwood knows how to do that… And our American readers don’t get that reference -)

So, along comes the knight in shining armour to match that silver-lined cloud, in the form of Avi Networks, who I met up with recently at IP Expo and was suitably impressed by. Its solution, logically, is SaaS-based and provides web app firewalling and service mesh for containers, as well as load-balancing and global server load-balancing across a multi-cloud environment. Avi rightly argues that appliance-based L-B solutions are not designed for the public cloud; correct, in the same way that Dartmouth’s Victorian streets were not designed for car parking, something I have first-hand experience of. If only I could park in the cloud…

The Avi solution, then, comes as a cloud-managed service; a true SaaS-based L-B controller, meaning very fast deployment, no field engineers required to be onsite across the globe (bang go your airmiles guys!) and adds/changes are simple as, so OpEx is bound to be lower too.

If only I’d taken out that copyright, would I be due royalties? Regardless, it would be most interesting to get my virtual hands on said virtual solution to see how closely it resembles my own creation!