Applications have evolved over the past decade, and application delivery—the means of presenting an application to users—has evolved as well. This evolution is in part due to the fact that today’s environments more heavily rely on cloud and mobile technologies. In the past, businesses would build an application for use on desktops and for users confined by a LAN. Today, applications have to function across heterogeneous networks and at scale. This has created a need for high performance in modern application delivery solutions.
Application Delivery Controller
The Need for Availability
Today’s consumers have a higher expectation that the applications and devices they interact with will always work, and for any information they need to be available instantly. In the workplace, this has translated to employees having the same expectations for their work devices and applications. In addition, employees want the flexibility to be able to use their personal devices at work, and to be able to work at any hours of the day or night.
This has created unique pressures on businesses. Companies are striving toward creating business applications that are as intuitive and user-friendly as those that are widely available for personal use. They are also investing in the infrastructure to ensure that employees always have access to the resources they need. By planning for seamless failover by bringing on additional servers, businesses can avoid a scenario that a server would go down and take the accessibility of its associated applications with it.
Evolution of the Application Delivery Controller
For years, application delivery controllers have been heavily relied on in business environments. They adapt applications to current networks and protocols, as well as ensure an application’s availability, security, and performance. When application delivery controllers were first developed, they provided limited functionality. Today, the core functionality of the ADC is provided by load balancers.
Load Balancer as an ADC
Resonate’s load balancers excel at the core function of the ADC by distributing application traffic across a server cluster. The load balancer can check the health and availability of individual servers, and route incoming requests to healthy servers according to their configured algorithm. By providing this function, the load balancer can avoid any potential disruptions.
When used at scale, load balancers also have the ability to enhance application delivery across server clusters in geographically dispersed locations. Resonate’s global load balancers can select the appropriate site that will minimize latency, and work in tandem with local application delivery controllers to maximize overall user experience.
Benefits of Using Load Balancers for Application Delivery
Relying on Resonate’s load balancers for your application’s delivery has a number of advantages. Here are some of the benefits:
Our load balancers are capable of a variety of functions for improving application performance. For instance, load balancing techniques can be applied at the database level for SQL load balancing, increasing the number of connections that can be handled by a database cluster. Load balancers can also manage SSL certificates or decrypt traffic before it reaches the servers. They are also able to assist in offloading some of the roles of the servers, such as compression and caching.
Resonate’s load balancers can also provide enhanced performance for application delivery over a mobile network, where bandwidth can be constrained. With domain sharding, content is distributed into subdomains, which can be delivered simultaneously and speed page load time. Load balancers can also convert image files and compress scripts to reduce download times.
Application Delivery by Resonate
Resonate is a load balancing software company offering solutions that provide superior application delivery for our clients. We offer local and global products that can be used together or in conjunction with third-party solutions to meet any need. We are able to provide increased availability and optimal performance for applications running in a variety of environments. To learn more about enhancing the delivery of your business applications, contact us today.