Breaking the Mold: Why the Design Paradigm of Legacy ADCs Cannot Keep Up

Imagine you are the head of a well-established postal service. For decades, your system relied on traditional mail carriers delivering letters and packages by hand, and this method served its purpose. But over time, the way people communicate and send items has radically changed. The rise of email, instant messaging, and e-commerce has transformed the landscape. Now, people expect instant, digital communication and same-day deliveries.

While the old system of hand-delivering letters is still functional, it is becoming increasingly inefficient in a world where speed, precision, and adaptability are essential. Worse still, trying to design a new mail system based on the old paradigm of manual delivery will never deliver a solution that meets today's reality. You would be clinging to outdated methods that cannot support the expectations of instant service, real-time tracking, or the complexity of global logistics.

Just like the shift in communication and delivery methods, application delivery has evolved beyond the capabilities of legacy ADCs. Before jumping to solutions, it is crucial to understand the challenges posed by outdated paradigms that simply cannot keep pace with modern applications operating across diverse, dynamic environments.

The Changing Landscape of Application Delivery

Modern applications demand agility across multiple sites, faster operations, comprehensive application protection, and more self-service capabilities. They also require actionable SLA visibility, especially when operating across multiple clouds and environments. Additionally, there is a strong expectation for total cost of ownership (TCO) optimization. Legacy ADC solutions, designed for stable on-premises data centers, often face inefficiencies in multi-cloud operations, application protection, and access management, and rely heavily on specialized expertise. Furthermore, their visibility tools for monitoring and troubleshooting are often inadequate, leading to significant long-term costs.

Adapting to a Dynamic Application Landscape

Organizations today navigate complex application environments with rapidly changing requirements. In a multi-cloud world, ADC agility is paramount. Operating across diverse environments and cloud platforms like OpenStack, VMware, Azure, AWS, and GCP demands a unified approach to simplify management and operation. Consistent functionality and performance, along with smooth transitions across all environments, are essential to meet dynamic business demands.

Integrated Application Protection Challenges

As the application threat landscape evolves, protecting against an increasing number of threat vectors has become more complex. Traditional ADCs with integrated Web Application Firewall (WAF) modules are no longer sufficient. Modern threats require more advanced and adaptive protection measures. Additionally, the global shortage of cyber protection experts makes it difficult for organizations to maintain the necessary expertise in-house. Modern ADCs must keep protection measures up to date against evolving threats, reduce management overhead, and scale to handle increasing demands without requiring periodic upgrades.

Outdated Access Management

Effective user access management, including Single Sign-On (SSO), is critical for modern organizations. Traditional identity verification solutions and protocols, often based on on-premise systems, are increasingly outdated and difficult to maintain. These legacy systems struggle with interoperability, obsolete technologies, and outdated protocols, making them inefficient and prone to security vulnerabilities. Modern organizations require streamlined and efficient access management solutions that integrate seamlessly with advanced services like Okta and Azure.

Proactive SLA Management

Traditional ADCs provided limited and often unhelpful monitoring data, leading to inefficient and time-consuming problem-solving. There is a critical need for tools that empower administrators to detect SLA problems before they impact users and expedite root cause analysis. Addressing these needs is essential to enable ADC and infrastructure administrators to take a proactive role in managing the SLA of applications and services.

ADC Services Automation

ADC solutions have traditionally required expert, high-touch operations, introducing significant overhead and creating bottlenecks. This reliance on specialized knowledge and manual processes often leads to inefficiencies and delays in provisioning and maintaining ADC services. Organizations need to streamline ADC lifecycle tasks to reduce dependency on specialized expertise and minimize operational overhead. Compatibility with various orchestration tools and cloud platforms is essential to support self-service capabilities and enhance operational agility.

Challenges in Kubernetes Environments

Modern applications are rapidly evolving to operate within containers, utilizing an architecture that breaks the application into numerous microservices. Native ADCs in Kubernetes containers are often too basic and limited in their ability to expose services to the outside world. They lack advanced capabilities such as application protection, analytics, and cross-container load balancing. To address these limitations, there is a need to complement the native Kubernetes load balancer with an external ADC that can route traffic to each component within the Kubernetes container and continuously adapt to application changes.

Enabling Efficiency and Cost Savings

The adoption of cloud technology focuses on higher agility and cost efficiency. However, most organizations now operate across multiple public clouds, private clouds, and datacenter environments. The traditional rigid ADC licensing model per appliance or virtual appliance is no longer viable. Modern ADC services must seamlessly migrate between environments and scale up or down without concerns about incorrect license sizes. This ensures optimal utilization of ADC functionality and capacity for any deployment scenario throughout the solution's lifecycle.

Conclusion

The legacy ADC paradigm faces numerous challenges in adapting to the evolving needs of modern applications and simplified operations. These include the complexity of multi-cloud operations, evolving threat landscapes, outdated access management systems, and the lack of actionable SLA visibility. The transition to Kubernetes-based applications requires a complete shift in the ADC design paradigm to provide advanced ADC services in an environment designed for microservices. Addressing these challenges requires modern ADC solutions that offer agility and advanced protection while simplifying operations.

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