Best Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Guide to Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Application delivery controllers (ADCs) are often referred to as “traffic steering” and “load balancing” devices. They are designed to improve the performance, reliability, security, scalability, and availability of applications delivered over IP networks. ADCs are an essential component of any application architecture or infrastructure.

In general, ADCs work by intercepting user traffic coming from outside a network and directing it to the appropriate servers within that network. By managing incoming and outgoing connections between servers, they can help provide better overall performance for applications and services hosted on the network. This is accomplished by distributing the load among multiple servers so that no one server becomes overloaded with requests.

An ADC also provides additional features such as SSL/TLS encryption for incoming connections, which helps protect all data exchanged between external users and internal services on your network. It also helps to ensure that only authorized users can access confidential information stored within your system while also providing greater security against malicious attacks such as denial-of-service (DoS) attacks or man-in-the-middle (MitM) assaults.

An ADC is typically configured using a combination of hardware appliances, software platforms or virtual appliances running on hypervisors. Virtualized solutions offer flexibility and scalability in terms of deployment options since they allow for automated management tasks such as scaling resources during peak periods of traffic demand or running maintenance activities without impacting service availability or performance levels.

In addition to improving application performance by redirecting user traffic according to preconfigured rulesets, an ADC can also perform numerous other functions such as providing web acceleration services for websites hosted on the same network; end-user authentication; logging; monitoring; content caching; TCP optimization; quality of service (QoS); service replication across multiple locations; link load balancing; health checks; firewall integration; global server load balancing (GSLB); clustering capabilities; IPv6 support; API gateway functions such as routing API calls based on input parameters;and more call control features like least cost routing or session border control protocols used in VoIP networks.

Overall, an ADC will help ensure that your applications remain available at all times while performing optimally regardless of external conditions or incoming request volumes – enabling businesses to deliver high quality customer experiences while maintaining their competitive edge in today’s digital marketplace.

Features Offered by Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

• Load Balancing: Application delivery controllers use load balancing to evenly distribute application traffic across multiple servers. This prevents one server from becoming overloaded, improving system reliability and scalability.
• SSL Offloading: Application delivery controllers can offload the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption and decryption tasks from the application servers. This reduces the load on the servers and improves application performance.
• Caching: Application delivery controllers can cache frequently-accessed content, reducing the load on the application servers and improving performance.
• Application Firewalling: Application delivery controllers can provide application firewalling to protect applications from malicious attacks.
• Application Acceleration: Application delivery controllers can use various techniques to accelerate the performance of web applications. This includes content compression, HTTP header optimization, and connection multiplexing.
• Protocol Optimization: Application delivery controllers can optimize various protocols, such as HTTP, FTP and DNS, to improve application performance.
• Global Server Load Balancing: Application delivery controllers can use geographic information to route application traffic to the closest server, improving application response times.
• Application Availability: Application delivery controllers can monitor applications and automatically detect and respond to application failures. This helps ensure that applications are always available.

What Types of Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Are There?

• Load Balancing: Application delivery controllers (ADCs) can distribute incoming requests across multiple servers, helping to ensure that all requests are quickly processed. This helps to improve performance, scalability and reliability of the application.
• Security: Application delivery controllers provide increased security against denial-of-service attacks and other malicious activities. They also provide encryption for web traffic.
• Compression: ADCs can compress data which reduces the amount of bandwidth needed to send the same amount of data, thus improving network monitoring, efficiency and performance.
• Protocols: They provide support for different protocols such as HTTP/HTTPS, TCP/IP, UDP and SSL.
• Caching: ADCs can cache static content so it doesn't need to be retrieved from the origin server every time a request is made, saving valuable resources such as CPU and memory.
• Quality of Service: ADCs can prioritize certain types of traffic over others so that services with higher priority receive better treatment in terms of throughput and response times.
• Application Layer Processing: Advanced application delivery controllers have the capability to process traffic at the application layer level to filter or modify request/response data on-the-fly without impacting the performance of applications or networks.
• Protocol Optimization: ADCs can work to optimize certain protocols, such as HTTP/HTTPS, SMTP, DNS and FTP by compressing their data or load-balancing traffic.
• Firewalls: Application delivery controllers have built-in firewalls which help to protect the application from external threats such as malicious attacks.
• Traffic Control: Advanced application delivery controllers also provide traffic control capabilities that allow administrators to set up rules to define what type of requests are sent to which server groups.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Trends

1. Automation: Application delivery controllers are increasingly being integrated with automation solutions to maximize efficiency and effectiveness. This helps to reduce manual effort and increases the speed of application delivery.
2. Cloud-based Platforms: Application delivery controllers are becoming increasingly deployed on cloud-based platforms, allowing organizations to scale up their solutions quickly and easily, without needing additional hardware or software investments.
3. Multi-Cloud Strategies: Many organizations are adopting multi-cloud strategies and using application delivery controllers to help manage the complexities of such deployments. This helps to ensure applications are delivered securely and reliably, even when running across different cloud providers.
4. Security: Application delivery controllers are being used to improve security by providing authentication and authorization, as well as helping to secure applications from DDoS attacks.
5. Load Balancing: Application delivery controllers are also used for load balancing, which helps to ensure that traffic is distributed evenly across multiple servers. This helps to ensure that applications perform optimally and reduces the risk of downtime due to high traffic loads.
6. Analytics & Monitoring: Application delivery controllers can be used for analytics and monitoring, helping organizations gain better insights into their application performance. This enables them to make more informed decisions about their application delivery strategy.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Benefits

1. Improved Performance: An ADC helps to improve the performance of applications by providing acceleration and optimization, such as caching. By reducing latency, allocating resources and balancing traffic, ADCs can help applications respond faster and be more stable.
2. Increased Security: ADCs provide a layer of protection for web applications through capabilities such as firewall integration and access control lists. This helps protect against malicious attacks, data exfiltration, cross-site scripting and more.
3. Scalability: ADCs can scale quickly in response to changing user demand or unexpected spikes in traffic volume. This helps ensure that your application remains available even during times of high demand.
4. Cost Savings: By offloading common tasks from the application server to the ADC, organizations can reduce both their hardware costs and administrative overhead associated with running multiple servers.
5. Load Balancing: ADCs use algorithms to divide incoming requests among multiple servers or clusters of servers in order to maximize throughput and minimize latency. This ensures that users experience consistent performance regardless of where they are located or how much traffic is currently being processed.
6. Fault Tolerance: If one server goes down or fails to respond, an ADC can automatically reroute incoming requests to an alternate server or cluster with minimal disruption in service. This helps provide high availability for mission-critical applications.
7. Monitoring and Intelligence: ADCs provide intelligent analytics that can help IT staff understand user behavior, identify potential performance issues, and make informed decisions regarding resource allocation and scaling strategies.

How to Find the Right Application Delivery Controller (ADC)

Use the comparison engine on this page to help you compare application delivery controllers (ADC) by their features, prices, user reviews, and more.

1. When selecting an Application Delivery Controller (ADC), it is important to understand the features and capabilities of each ADC on the market. The first step should be to list out the needs for your application delivery that must be met, such as scalability, performance optimization, and security. This will help you narrow down your options when researching different ADCs.
2. Next, consider how much traffic and usage your application will require from users around the world. Knowing this will help you decide which type of ADC is best suited for your particular use case. For example, a global cloud-based ADC may be better suited if you need worldwide delivery for a large number of users.
3. Thirdly, research the different vendors offering ADCs in order to find out what features are available with each one and which ones meet your requirements in terms of performance, scalability, and security. Compare features across multiple vendors to ensure that you get an optimal solution at a price that works within your budget. It can also be helpful to read customer reviews to get an idea of what others think about different products before making a decision.
4. Finally, once you have identified an ADC that meets all of your requirements, make sure that it can integrate easily with other components in your network architecture without any extra cost or effort. It is also important to ensure that its security protocols are up-to-date so that any data transmitted across its platform remains safe and secure at all times.

By following this process, you should be able to select the right application delivery controller that meets all of your needs at a price that works within your budget.

Who Uses Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)?

• End User: End users are the people who use applications that require an ADC. They typically access applications via a web browser or other client software.
• Application Developers/Designers: These individuals design and build the applications for which ADCs manage delivery. They also provide instructions to IT teams on configuring ADCs to meet their application’s specific needs.
• IT Administrator/Architects: The professionals responsible for designing, implementing, and managing an ADC deployment within a data center or cloud environment. They are responsible for configuring the ADC for maximum performance and availability.
• Network Engineers: These engineers design and maintain networks that support the traffic between the end user and the application server. They are responsible for ensuring that network protocols, such as TCP/IP, are configured correctly in order to maximize throughput between end users and application servers.
• Software Developers: This role works closely with application developers in order to develop any custom scripts or programs needed to integrate with an ADC solution. They also test new features of an ADC system prior to deployment in a production environment.
• DevOps Staff: These individuals combine development and operations tasks in order troubleshoot issues related to both hardware and software components of an ADC system deployments quickly.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Pricing

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) can range in cost from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the size, features and scalability that is needed for your particular project. On average, small-scale ADCs are typically priced between $500 and $3000, while larger scale options can range from $5000 to upwards of $25000.

When looking at an ADC for your network or organization, you should consider many factors including system requirements such as scalability needs, throughput requirements, number of simultaneous logical servers supported, geographic deployment models etc. You may also need to consider specific features such as web application firewall support, Layer 7 switching/routing support etc. All these factors will affect the total cost of ownership associated with an ADC solution.

For those wishing to save money in their ADC purchase decision-making process, many vendors offer a variety of licensing plans which allow customers to pay only for the features they need when they need them. Additionally there are multiple open source options available that provide basic functionality without any license costs associated with them but this comes with the trade off of much less functionality and reduced platform security concerns compared to most commercial solutions.

Overall it is important to take into account all your needs for an Application Delivery Controller and evaluate multiple solutions before making a purchasing decision in order to ensure you get the best feature set that meets your budget constraints.

Types of Software that Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Integrates With

Application delivery controllers (ADC) can integrate with a variety of different types of software. Common examples include application performance monitoring systems, web servers, databases, and application development among others. For example, an ADC can help ensure that the data requested by web users is routed to the correct web server and securely delivered via TLS encryption. It can also detect when a database is under heavy load and offload some of the processing to other servers in its cluster. Additionally, ADCs are often used to integrate with continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines in order to streamline deployment processes, as well as with monitoring tools like Splunk or Grafana that provide real-time performance analytics on traffic flowing through the system.