Enabling remote work while ensuring security with unprecedented speed has dramatically increased the need for applications to be available across different environments, regardless of time zones and peak usage conditions. Legacy infrastructure lacks the elasticity, flexibility, and agility needed to deliver applications securely and reliably. The rise of containers, APIs, and observability needs presents an opportunity for infrastructure to become composable, automated, and intelligent without the limitations of the appliance-based approach. Modern enterprises need an on-demand, fast-to-deploy, easy-to-use app delivery solution that facilitates multi-cloud consistency across on-premises and cloud environments.
VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi Networks) uses a software-defined architecture that separates the central control plane (Avi Controller) from the distributed data plane (Avi Service Engines). Avi is 100% REST API based, making it fully automatable and seamless with the CI/CD pipeline for application delivery. The Avi Controller is the “brain” of the entire system and acts as a single point of intelligence, management, and control across a distributed fabric of enterprise-grade load balancers, application security, container ingress and analytics. The Avi Controller provides decision automation based on closed-loop telemetries and presents actionable insights based on based on application monitoring, end-to-end timing, searchable traffic logs, security insights, log insights, client insights, and more. See Figure 1.