Application Delivery Platform Definition
An Application Delivery Platform is a suite of technologies that handles application services like load balancing, security controls and traffic management in data centers and cloud environments. The application services platform’s role is to deliver applications reliably and securely to end users.
![Diagram depicting an application delivery platform providing; load balancing, performance monitoring, autoscaling, service proxy, SSL offload and WAF for applications running on bare metal, microservices containers, X86 or virtual machine environments.](png/application-delivery-platform-diagram.png)
What is Application Delivery Management?
Application delivery management is the discipline of achieving fast, predictable and secure access to applications. Application delivery management ensures vital enterprise applications are available and responsive for users, which requires throughput optimization, security, troubleshooting and analytics.
What is Application Delivery Used For?
Application delivery is necessary as consumers increasingly go online to access services or to make purchases. These customers require their transactions to be fast and reliable. Equally, organizations are reliant on applications for their daily operations. To enable access to these online services, application delivery solutions are essential. The application delivery controller (ADC) is the most important part of the application delivery model. An ADC is an advanced load balancer that sits in front of application servers and directs client requests to the servers. The ADC maximizes performance and capacity utilization by directing application traffic.
What is Virtual Application Delivery?
Virtual application delivery (vADC) utilizes a virtual or software-based application delivery controller to provide intelligent and sophisticated load-balancing capabilities. Unlike a hardware-based ADC, the virtual load balancer can run on any infrastructure, including the public cloud. Virtual application delivery also offers network and application innovations like clustering, intelligent architecture and deep packet inspection. These components ensure applications run smoothly and effectively.
What Are the Benefits of a Cloud-based Application Delivery process?
A cloud-based application delivery process offers the following IT benefits:
• Simplified infrastructure: Replaces a hardware-based solution with a public cloud service that is better equipped to scale globally without compromising delivery quality.
• Reduced costs: Companies spend less on support when the user experience improves with application performance. A cloud-based application delivery process also saves on hardware acquisition and maintenance costs.
• Increased productivity: Efficiency is optimized when employees can quickly access the information and services on applications from any device, anywhere. An application delivery process makes it possible for applications to perform faster in a cloud-based environment.
• Improved end user experience: Customers will increasingly use and prefer high performance applications made possible by an efficient cloud-based application delivery process.
What is an Application Delivery Network?
An application delivery network (ADN) provides application availability, security, visibility and acceleration. The technologies are deployed together in a combination of WAN optimization controllers (WOCs) and application delivery controllers (ADCs). The application delivery controller distributes traffic among many servers. The WAN optimization controller uses caching and compression to reduce the number of bits that flow over a network.
What Does VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer Offer as an Application Delivery Platform?
The VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer application delivery architecture is purpose-built for the cloud and mobile era using a unique analytics-driven, 100% software approach. The VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer is the first platform to leverage the power of software-defined principles to achieve unprecedented agility, insights, and efficiency in application delivery.
For more on the actual implementation of load balancing, security applications and web application firewalls check out our Application Delivery How-To Videos.
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