Software Load Balancer
Application delivery controller & beyond
VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer delivers multi-cloud application services including a Software Load Balancer, Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Container Ingress. NSX ALB helps ensure a fast, scalable, and secure application experience.
Unlike legacy load balancers, NSX ALB is 100% software-defined and provides:
- Multi-cloud – Consistent experience across on-premises and cloud environments through central management and orchestration
- Intelligence – Built-in analytics drive actionable insights that make autoscaling seamless, automation intelligent and decision making easy
- Automation – 100% RESTful APIs enable self-service provisioning and integration into the CI/CD pipeline for application delivery
Autoscaling of Load Balancers and Applications
The software-defined, scale-out architecture of NSX ALB provides on-demand autoscaling of elastic load balancers. The distributed software load balancers and the backend applications can scale up or down in response to real-time traffic monitoring. Application load balancing becomes more adaptable and intelligent.
- No more overprovisioning of appliance-based (virtual or hardware) load balancers
- Elastic scale based on learned traffic thresholds
- Per-app, elastic load balancing to maintain SLAs
Web Application Analytics & Performance Insights
Take advantage of the load balancers’ privileged location (in the path of application traffic) in the data center by gathering useful insights from real-time telemetry collected from distributed service delivery components.
- Easy-to-use dashboard with actionable performance, security, and client insights
- Native integrations with analytics platforms including Splunk, AppDynamics, Grafana, and Cisco Tetration Platform
- Ability to record and replay traffic events like “Network DVR” for faster troubleshooting without depending on log files or TCPdump
- Visibility with end-to-end timing and per-application health scores based on real-time telemetries including application performance, resource utilization, security, and anomalous behavior
Automation for IT, Self-Service for Developers
Match the continuous application delivery goals and DevOps principles of modern enterprises by automating routine tasks such as virtual IP (VIP) provisioning and configuration changes.
- Application service automation through 100% REST API
- Visibility with app maps to monitor and troubleshoot apps
- Policy-driven self-service for modern web application developers
Why Use a Software Load Balancer?
When it comes down to it, software load balancers are superior to using a virtual or hardware load balancer for its flexibility, scalability, speed, and cost-effectiveness. They can run fast in almost any environment and are not inhibited by hardware configuration limitations. For the most optimal performance you can scale the infrastructure to the size you prefer, giving you the power to manage you load balancer in the smoothest way possible. It’s best to get on the software load balancer train now as it continues to grow and becomes more refined with progression of technology, so don’t fall behind!
Swisslos Delivers Superior Online Experience with Modern Application Delivery from NSX ALB
Problem
Swisslos’ lottery application was supported by appliance-based load balancers that lacked elasticity, and scalability. Poor load balancing performance impacted their ability to deliver a great end user experience.
Solution
Switching to VMware NSX’s software defined load balancer allowed Swisslos one-click deployment, elastic scale, automation and app analytics. This resulted in reduced app troubleshooting time and operational savings of 60%.