Avi Networks Introduces CADP 

Avi Networks today announced the general availability of the industry's first Cloud Application Delivery Platform (CADP), based on its Hyperscale Distributed Resources Architecture (HYDRA). Avi Networks delivers enterprise customers the benefits of a hyper-scale approach to application delivery, for any infrastructure, at any scale, for on-premise and cloud-based applications. Founded by networking industry veterans and backed by top tier investors, Avi Networks has raised $33 million in funding and has several Fortune 500 customers in production and pilots.

The $4 billion ADC and network monitoring markets are going through major transitions. As applications move to cloud-based infrastructures and mobile becomes the dominant endpoint, it becomes increasingly difficult to guarantee end-user application experience. Large cloud service providers such as Amazon, Facebook and Google have abandoned expensive fleets of proprietary ADC appliances from incumbent vendors. Instead, these web giants have internally developed analytics-driven, scale-out layers of software-defined infrastructure services that enable them to efficiently and reliably deliver hyperscale applications on commodity hardware. However, most enterprises do not have the luxury of investing in engineering resources to internally develop software for new application delivery architectures.

"Application traffic flows have become less deterministic, and infrastructure architects can no longer rely solely on centralized appliances to provide necessary application delivery and security services. New deployment models are emerging to help enterprises with this transition," Gartner said in a recent research report, The Future of Application Delivery Is (Partly) Cloudy, by Joe Skorupa and Mark Fabbi, published October 31, 2014

"In today's mobile cloud era, the traditional appliance-centric, monolithic application delivery approach doesn't work anymore," said Umesh Mahajan, Founder and CEO of Avi Networks. "Inspired by the proven architectural approach pioneered by hyperscale cloud service providers, we developed the Avi Networks Cloud Application Delivery Platform to allow enterprise customers to accelerate their cloud journey, while maximizing their end-user application experience."

In addition to basic ADC functions, the hyperscale approach to application delivery needs to have the following five virtues:

• Agility via programmability, self-service and an on-demand elastic scale.
• Analytics and insights about every real-time and historic user-to-application transaction.
• Adaptive to changes in user-demand or application scale, automatically.
• Mobile-access optimization -- from a performance, scale and security perspective.
• Multi-cloud support for on-premise, private and public cloud deployments.

Earlier this year, several web giants lifted the covers on internal projects with the hyperscale design pattern: Google expounded the virtues of combining centralized control with distributed data plane in its Andromeda network services stack, and Facebook discussed feedback-based load balancing in its AutoScale system.

Similarly, at the heart of the Avi Networks CADP is a revolutionary architecture called Hyperscale Distributed Resources Architecture - HYDRA. Based on SDN principles, HYDRA separates the data plane from the control plane -- an industry first for Application Delivery Controllers and Load Balancers. HYDRA is built on top of the following core capabilities:

• Distributed Microservices: Application delivery services (load balancing, SSL termination) are performed by high performance Avi Service Engines. Multiple services can be applied to application traffic in a single efficient "pass" through a Service Engine. Avi Service Engines can be co-located with applications within and across cloud locations and grouped together for higher performance. They have integrated data collectors, which gather end-to-end timing information, metrics and logs for each user-to-application transaction.
• Inline Analytics: Data gathered by the integrated data collectors is first streamlined by smart reduction functions applied at the source. Next, the reduced data streams of useful observations are passed to the Avi controller cluster, where further analytics are performed to enable real-time, highly granular insights into application health, end-user experience tracking, as well as anomaly detection.
• Closed-Loop Application Delivery: Inline Analytics and Distributed Microservices are tightly interwoven resulting in the industry's only closed loop application delivery solution. Distributed Microservices continuously, automatically adjusts the performance, placement and capacity of application delivery services based on the end-user and application insights derived by the Inline Analytics complex.