load balancers &
application performance
THE RIGHT BALANCE
Ranga Rajagopalan, CTO at Avi Networks, explains four strategies
for optimising load balancers and application performance.
T
he volume of online
transactions has continued
to grow exponentially
over the past few years
across an increasing
number of web enabled devices.
This has obviously put pressure
on networks and managers.
However, it is the concerns around
privacy and cyber security and the
resulting increase in encrypted
online traffic that has had the
real impact on networks. Fifty per
cent of all Internet traffic is now
encrypted, a huge number, with
even the likes of Netflix streaming
most of its high bandwidth
content as encrypted traffic.
Network administrators and
planners have long known that
better security comes at the cost
of network performance and
34 | May 2017
throughput from the infrastructure
that they manage. Ensuring that
network services such as load
balancing and the corresponding
application performance are
optimised is a crucial step in
helping to mitigate this.
There are four key strategies
that network administrators
should consider.
Central management
Application networking
services have been made a
great deal more user friendly
for network administrators
with the introduction of new
software defined approaches
to Layer 4-7 services. It
has allowed the delivery of
application services across a
number of areas, including load
balancing, application security
and analytics with centralised
control. For example, load
balancers connected to a central
orchestration engine which can
control the lifecycle of software
load balancers give network
managers visibility and control
across the entire deployment.
This management has also
enabled network managers to
simplify certificate management
and to enforce TLS profiles which
can use ciphers that have been
previously approved by the security
team. It also enables the delivery of
services for a number of key areas
such as SSL termination, DDoS
protection and the Layer 4-7 ACLs
across multiple private or public
cloud environments.