Breaking Free from Legacy Constraints: The New Paradigm for ADCs in Multi-Cloud Era

In our previous blog post, we compared legacy ADCs to an outdated traffic system in a growing city, struggling to manage the dynamic flow of modern applications. Building on that analogy, let's delve deeper into how modern Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) can address these evolving challenges and ensure seamless application performance and security in today's multi-cloud environments.

Adapting to Multi-Cloud Environments

As organizations transition to multi-cloud environments, ADCs must evolve to manage traffic across platforms like OpenStack, VMware, Azure, AWS, and GCP. This shift demands a unified approach to simplify management and enhance operational efficiency. Traditional ADCs face several key issues. Managing diverse environments requires a versatile solution that can seamlessly operate across different platforms. The increasing number of cyber threats necessitates advanced protection mechanisms beyond traditional Web Application Firewalls (WAFs). Legacy systems based on on-premises solutions are becoming obsolete, making it difficult to maintain effective user access management. High-touch operations and reliance on specialized knowledge lead to inefficiencies and delays. Limited monitoring data hampers proactive problem-solving, leading to inefficient operations. Native ADCs in Kubernetes containers often lack the capability to expose services effectively to the outside world.

To address these challenges, modern ADC solutions must be agile, automated, and scalable. Modern ADCs must support seamless operations across multiple sites. This includes consistent deployment, easy migration of applications, enhanced visibility, and streamlined automation. Flexibility in licensing is also crucial to adapt to the dynamic nature of ADC services. For instance, a Global Elastic License model allows organizations to dynamically allocate capacity across multiple virtual ADC instances, optimizing resource use and reducing costs, while maintaining agility and adaptivity to any business scenario that arrives.

Another type of environment ADCs must adopt to is Kubernetes. Integrating advanced ADC services with Kubernetes applications further enhances performance, protection, and visibility. While Kubernetes provides native (and basic) load balancing functionality, an external full-blown ADC with all modern capabilities can provide a much-needed added value DevOps require. An external ADC that can integrate with the Kubernetes Container, and act as a native load balancer (but more advanced) is one of the capabilities DevOps expect from modern ADCs. One way modern ADCs are approaching this need is through a Kubernetes Connector which can listen to the container's controller and dynamically adjusts ADC configurations based on the container's activity, providing advanced load balancing and security services to each pod and node within that container.

Enhancing Application Protection

With the complexity of modern threats, application protection must be managed, automated, and scalable. The new paradigm requires ADCs to work tightly and interactively with cloud application protection services. This approach offers several advantages. A robust cloud application protection service typically provides more up-to-date protections, leveraging the latest threat intelligence. It can accommodate the computational power needed to deploy AI tools that defend against AI-based cyber-attacks. Additionally, cloud-based solutions can scale effortlessly without requiring forklift upgrades, ensuring that protection grows with the application's needs. Most importantly, this integration significantly reduces the management overhead associated with legacy on-premises application protection, freeing up valuable resources and personnel.

By integrating the cloud-based app protection with the ADC organizations can avoid rerouting traffic through 3rd party services or have their online services dependent on the availability of those cloud based applications protection service providers. Moreover, they can avoid sharing their private SSL keys with a 3rd party service provider, and still benefit from a managed cloud based app protection service.

Effective user access management is also critical in modern environments. ADCs must support integration with cloud-based identity provider (IdP) services, ensuring secure access to applications. Supporting protocols like SAML and OIDC enables comprehensive access management for both end-user and API-based services.

Proactive Visibility and Analytics

Proactive SLA management requires meaningful visibility into a range of metrics. Modern ADCs should measure application, traffic, performance, and availability metrics, translating them into actionable insights. Comprehensive analytics enable administrators to quickly identify and resolve issues before they impact users. A good analytic tool will empower network and ADC administrators to be proactive when an SLA breach occurs, instead of reactive when someone complains.

Conclusion

In the dynamic world of multi-cloud environments and evolving threats, modern ADCs are like the advanced traffic systems needed for a growing city. By adopting agile, automated, and scalable ADC solutions, organizations can optimize their application delivery, enhance security, and reduce the total cost of ownership, ensuring smooth and efficient traffic flow across all application environments.

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.