DCN May 2017 | Page 34

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.