In the current dynamic IT environment, staying shackled to legacy load balancers and complex iRule scripting can lead to a series of frustrating challenges. This blog post will explain why everything doesn’t require custom scripts. Instead, out-of-the-box policies should take care of 80% of situations. Want to get free from the technical debt? See the power of the Avi.
Perils of Being Stuck in the Past: Legacy Load Balancers
Legacy load balancers and iRules, built for a pre-cloud era, struggle to meet modern IT demands. With rigid hardware, fragile scripting, and limited performance, they create complexity, inefficiency, and risk—leading to configuration drift, poor visibility, and high costs.
1. Tech of the Hardware Era
Legacy load balancers rely on outdated technology, requiring complex scripting for basic tasks like HTTP-to-HTTPS redirects and content switching. Rigid hardware forces overprovisioning, making scaling difficult and capacity planning impossible. High availability remains inefficient, with 50% of capacity idling in active-standby mode.
2. Bottlenecked Performance
Legacy load balancers rely on outdated TCL scripting technology from the 1980s, prone to errors that cause failures and require extensive testing. iRules add computational overhead at scale, demanding meticulous coding and creating a maintenance nightmare for IT teams.
3. Fragile Maintenance
With legacy load balancers, iRules become untouchable due to their complexity and lack of clear ownership. As original developers move on, these systems turn into black boxes, making changes risky and limiting adaptability. Over time, poor documentation and configuration drift make maintenance, consistency, and compliance increasingly difficult.
Break Free from iRules and Reclaim Your IT Control
Clinging to legacy load balancers and complex scripting like iRules leads to inefficiency and risk. Avi delivers simplicity, performance, and freedom from technical debt. Break free and take control of your IT infrastructure today.
1. Key Features as Default Policies
Avi is a game-changer. It comes with key features enabled by default as pre-configured policies, saving you from the hassle of complex configurations. With simple click-through GUI or API calls, you can customize security and load balancing policies effortlessly.
2. Flexible Customization
For complex use cases that require highly customized rules, Avi offers the option to use custom data-plane scripts. While similar in concept to iRules, it’s built on the Lua scripting language that is decades newer, more computationally and memory efficient, better documented, and easier to code. No scripting expertise needed—just use Avi’s ready-to-go sample rules.
3. Simplify Migration with the Avi Conversion Tool (ACT)
When migrating from legacy load balancers, ACT offers an intuitive interface that significantly reduces the burden and costs of migration. It converts F5 configuration objects, including iRules, to corresponding configurations on the Avi Controller, all while maintaining up-time during live migrations. ACT now to unlock the full operational and cost-saving benefits of Avi.
