App economy has mandated modern load balancing with cloud speed and ease, based on a distributed and resilient architecture. The need for a next-gen load balancer is accelerated by the drastic shift to Kubernetes / container workloads. The advent of AI adds further uncertainty. In response, legacy vendors made disruptive hardware and software changes in attempts to mimic software-defined principles. VMware Avi Load Balancer – industry’s 1st and only software load balancer battle-tested in large enterprises – is your True Next.
Architectural Requirements of a Next-Gen Load Balancer
Avi pioneers the next-gen software-defined load balancing, adapting to cloud, container, and AI trends effortlessly. Here are the 5 key requirements that are hard to replicate:
1. Automation and Self-Service: Better, Faster, Smarter
Avi accelerates ticket-based workflows with fully automated, self-service 100% REST API integration. Developers provision Virtual IPs (VIPs) in minutes, enabling rapid CI/CD deployments. Seamless integration with Ansible, Terraform, and VMware Automation transforms manual tasks into one-click operations.
2. App Resilience Redefined: Elastic Scalability, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery
Avi’s distributed dataplanes scale dynamically with demand, ensuring high availability and disaster recovery. Its architecture automatically reroutes traffic during failures to maintain uptime and app health, while self-healing restores services instantly for unmatched reliability.
3. Analytics-Driven Insights and Rapid Troubleshooting
Legacy load balancers lack application performance insights, often relying on TCP dumps for troubleshooting. Avi’s built-in analytics provide real-time visibility into transaction times, latencies, and app health. Intuitive dashboards consolidate key metrics, helping IT teams resolve issues faster and cut mean time to innocence (MTTI) from weeks to minutes.
4. Container Workloads Support with Enterprise-Grade Features
Avi is an infrastructure and workload-agnostic platform, integrating seamlessly with Kubernetes, VMware Tanzu, OpenShift, and major public cloud platforms like EKS, AKS, and GKE. It delivers unified L4-L7 services, including load balancing, WAF, GSLB, DNS, and analytics, ensuring consistency, visibility, and streamlined operations.
5. Simplified Operations and Cost Efficiency: Operational Savings Redefined
Unlike legacy systems that require costly hardware upgrades and manual processes, Avi eliminates hardware dependencies, running on standard servers with elastic scaling. Its centralized orchestration reduces operational costs by up to 43%, while non-disruptive upgrades and faster deployments boost efficiency and accelerate time-to-market.
Dilemma of Legacy Load Balancers and Their Challenges
As enterprises embrace cloud, DevOps, and containers in their environments, the limitations of the legacy approach to load balancing no longer meet the agility and scalability requirements modern application delivery requires.
The major drawbacks of legacy load balancers are:
- Rigid Architectures: Legacy load balancers are built on hardware-centric designs that lack elasticity. They cannot dynamically scale out or in, forcing organizations to overprovision resources.
- Complex Management: Each appliance requires manual configuration and management. There is no central policy or configuration management, leading to operational inefficiencies.
- Limited Visibility: These systems offer minimal application-level insights, making it difficult for IT teams to troubleshoot issues or optimize performance.
- Lack of Automation: Legacy systems rely on ticket-based workflows, delaying deployments and stifling innovation.
- Costly and Disruptive Upgrades: Hardware refreshes are expensive and time-consuming, exacerbated by software disruptions.
- Not designed for Containers: Designed for monolithic applications, these solutions fail to address the needs of containerized and microservices architectures, leading to fragmented solutions and integration challenges.
Avi.TrueNext vs. Legacy.NEXT: A Comparative Analysis
Legacy attempts to modernize feels like a rushed reaction rather than a deliberate innovation. While Avi has been advancing its software-defined architecture, hardware load balancers are playing catch-up, leaving customers to shoulder the risk of a nascent platform.
1. Proven Architecture vs. Nascent Solutions: For years, Avi has honed its software-defined architecture for scalability, reliability, and real-world performance. In contrast, legacy attempts remain in their infancy, plagued by bugs, instability, and a lack of refinement. These solutions fail to deliver robust analytics, self-service, and automation leaving customers in a bind.
2. Software-Defined Flexibility vs. Hardware Brittleness: Legacy solutions claim to be software-defined but remain hardware-bound. Avi’s decoupled control and data plane provide elasticity, agility, and simplified operations, while legacy hardware solutions tie businesses to rigid infrastructures that are hard to manage and scale.
3. Unified Platform vs. Fragmented Solutions: Avi’s all-in-one platform delivers local and global server load balancing (GSLB), Kubernetes ingress, and web app firewall (WAF), eliminating the need for multiple products and simplifying management. Legacy load balancers require separate solutions, increasing costs, complexity, and operational overhead.
4. Centralized Control and Operations vs. Clunky Installations: Built for DevOps with 100% REST APIs, Avi centralizes load balancer lifecycle management, cutting managed devices by 10x and reducing costs. In stark contrast, legacy platforms rely on decade-old architectures, requiring complex, time-consuming, manual installations and lacking true orchestration.
5. Smooth Transitions vs Complex and Disruptive Migrations: Migrating to newer platforms can be complex, requiring reworked automation workflow and in some cases, new hardware. Avi simplifies this with a phased migration approach, no hardware refresh and the Avi Conversion Tool for automated legacy configuration migration, ensuring a smoother transition.
The Smarter Way to Cloud: Plug-and-Play Load Balancing for VMware Cloud Foundation
Avi seamlessly integrates with the entire VCF stack, enabling plug-and-play deployment for simplified Day 0-2 operations, auto-scaling, and auto-healing. Unlike third-party solutions, Avi eliminates inefficiencies and fragmented visibility through tight VCF ecosystem integration. With automation, analytics, and scalability at its core, Avi enables organizations to unlock the full potential of their private cloud infrastructure.
When it comes to modern load balancing, Avi is not just the better option—it’s the ideal load balancer for VCF and the True Next for application delivery.
