Avi Networks, the leader in next-generation application services, today announced it has achieved breakthrough scalability with its elastic services fabric consisting of software-defined load balancers. Avi Networks’ software delivered one million SSL transactions per second (TPS) to a single web application, automatically scaling up load balancing services from zero to peak traffic, after which it scaled down to normal levels just as easily. This is unlike traditional hardware load balancers such as F5 Networks or Citrix Netscaler which would require huge investments in capital equipment that goes unused during normal periods of traffic.
Avi’s centrally managed, elastic services fabric is ideal for enterprises across industries requiring highly scalable, automated application services to handle traffic spikes due to denial of service (DoS) attacks, seasonal events such as Black Friday, and hybrid cloud use cases. It empowers IT departments to pay for maximum load balancing capacity on an as-needed basis, and scale it down as traffic returns to normal levels. With this demonstration, Avi Networks has completely debunked a common myth that companies must spend millions of dollars on hardware load balancers to handle large transaction volumes or high throughput.
The Internet is seeing ever increasing volumes of encrypted traffic in response to the higher incidence of cyberattacks – over 50 percent of all Internet traffic, including Netflix movies, is now encrypted with SSL/TLS. This presents new challenges for network managers and application architects who must ensure that their applications are secure and responsive for end users. The growing amount of encrypted traffic puts enormous strain on load balancers that must offload or decrypt these SSL-encrypted packets before they reach the application.
Avi Networks conducted the comprehensive demo on SSL traffic to prove how a software-defined architecture for load balancing delivers the most elastic and cost-effective approach for the growing volume of encrypted traffic. For the demo, Avi ran its software in front of a single web application to load balance a continuously growing volume of SSL encrypted transactions from over 320 clients. Avi’s built-in visibility and analytics dashboard was used to monitor the build-up of transactions and the application response. The demo was performed on the Google Cloud Platform but can easily be replicated on-premises or in any other cloud. It ran on 40 servers at an infrastructure cost of just $1.20 per server per hour, scaling out to handle one million SSL transactions per second and scaling back just as easily and efficiently.
“Enterprise customers increasingly value agile and flexible network infrastructure that supports their digital transformation initiatives by dynamically scaling up or down to meet application delivery requirements in a multi-cloud context,” said Brad Casemore, research director for datacenter networks at IDC. “Avi Networks’ test results demonstrate that a software-defined approach to application delivery can also attain a high degree of raw performance in conjunction with agility and flexibility.”
The demo is relevant for a number of use cases including:
Driving greater elasticity to respond to seasonal changes (e.g. Black Friday) in application traffic
Handling DDoS attacks by elastically autoscaling until the attack is mitigated
Managing modern container-based microservices applications at scale
Seamlessly scaling beyond the data center by automatically bursting to the cloud
Eliminating overprovisioning caused by expensive, purpose-built hardware load balancers
Scaling up or down dynamically through integration with native cloud APIs
“This demo validates what we hear from our customers everyday – our software-defined load balancing architecture brings webscale IT principles to manage and deliver their applications,” said Amit Pandey, CEO of Avi Networks. “With our platform, enterprises get a flexible, analytics-driven load balancing solution that can replace legacy load balancers at a fraction of the cost, bringing true elasticity and automation to application services in the data center or the cloud.”
For more details and instructions to replicate the demo, please visit https://avinetworks.com/million-tps-demo
About Avi Networks
Avi Networks delivers public-cloud-like agility for application services beyond load balancing including deep application analytics, predictive autoscaling, and security in the data center or public cloud. The Avi Vantage Platform delivers elastic, software-defined application services on commodity x86 servers, VMs or containers. The platform provides application services as a dynamic pool of resources that matches the automation needs of private or public cloud initiatives. Global 2000 technology, media, and financial services companies use Avi Networks to accelerate application delivery, enable self-service for application owners and lower their TCO. Learn more at www.avinetworks.com or @avinetworks.
