As Stephen R. Covey stated in his popular book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “True effectiveness requires balance.” VMware agrees. And when it comes to accelerating modern application delivery, true application effectiveness requires a modern load balancer. So, with a respectful nod to Stephen R. Covey, here are the seven requirements of highly effective load balancers.  

  1. Be proactive with self-service. Move away from “create a ticket and wait” developer experiences to self-service, role-based access control for owners to provision, troubleshoot, and monitor their own apps.
  2. Begin with the end in mind with on-demand autoscaling. Automation drives great user experiences. Plan for peak usage times without causing overprovisioning and idle capacity.
  3. Put things first with a 100 percent software solution. The need to support on-premises data center and multi-cloud deployments means that enterprises need to choose applications that work consistently across different environments with a single point of orchestration.
  4. Think win-win with real-time insights and visibility into application traffic. A modern load balancer should collect real-time application telemetry and provide insights into each transaction and end-user patterns.
  5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood with security insights. App vulnerabilities stem from incorrect access control policies or misconfigurations of application delivery controllers. Legacy solutions still can’t offer a simple way to understand the application’s security postures at a glance and can’t work across multiple data centers or cloud environments. 
  6. Synergize with multitenancy. Large enterprises supporting multiple applications and groups on shared infrastructure often end up spending more than necessary on lines of business. System upgrades, workload movements, or the addition of new tenants can also be disruptive events for all tenants.
  7. Sharpen the saw with a software-defined approach to application services. With a software-defined application services architecture, you can automate IT operations and integrate with existing and evolving technologies.  

The last one’s a bit of a stretch for the 7 Habits comparison.  

Download the eBook, Multi-Cloud Load Balancing for Dummies, to read more about how VMware is relating self-renewal to software-defined application services architecture and much more about how your organization can benefit from multi-cloud load balancing.