Application Services Definition
Application Services (often used instead of application management services or application services management) are a pool of services such as load balancing, application performance monitoring, application acceleration, autoscaling, micro‑segmentation, service proxy and service discovery needed to optimally deploy, run and improve applications.
![Diagram depicting application services such as; load balancing, performance monitoring, autoscaling, service proxy, SSL offload and WAF for applications running on servers and being delivered to application clients.](png/application-services-diagram.png)
What is Application Services Management?
The process of configuring, monitoring, optimizing and orchestrating different app services is known as application services management.
Today, organizations with their own data centers or which use the public cloud, handle applications services management. In the early days of online adoption, application service providers (or ASPs) were companies which would deliver applications to end users for a fixed cost. This single tenant, hosted model was largely replaced by the advent of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model which was multi-tenant and on-demand.
What is Cloud Application Services?
Cloud App Services are a wide range of specific application services for applications deployed in cloud-based resources. Services such as load balancing, application firewalling and service discovery can be achieved for applications running in private, public, hybrid or multi-cloud environments.
What are App Modernization Services?
Traditional applications were built as monolithic blocks of software. These monolithic applications have long life cycles because any changes or updates to one function, usually requires reconfiguring the entire application. This costly and time consuming process delays advancements and updates in application development.
Application Modernization Services enable the migration of monolithic, legacy application architectures to new application architectures that more closely match the business needs of modern enterprises’ application portfolio. Application modernization is often part of an organization’s digital transformation.
An example of this is the use of a microservices architecture where all app services are created individually and deployed separately from one another. This allows for scaling services based on specific business needs. Services can also be rapidly changed without affecting other parts of the application. Application-centric enterprises are choosing microservices architectures to take advantage of flexible container-based infrastructure models.
How does VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer Enable Application Services?
The VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer disrupts the industry’s definition of Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) with a 100% software approach to application services. Unlike legacy, appliance-based ADCs, The VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer delivers app services beyond load balancing, including, service proxy, application analytics, autoscaling, app map and micro-segmentation even for modern application architectures.
For more on the actual implementation of load balancing, security applications and web application firewalls check out our Application Delivery How-To Videos.
For more information on multi-cloud see the following resources: