The need for an A10 load balancer:

1. Slow Apps & Downtime

Today’s application traffic is encrypted chiefly with SSL/TLS and proliferating. Demand continues to grow, and users always expect a fast application response. Organizations must build reliable and scalable application services to sustain user traffic even during service maintenance. Traffic management is critical in avoiding costly downtime for business applications.

2. Application Threats

Regardless of location, either on-premises or in the cloud, your applications are at high risk of being compromised. Numerous types of application fraud, exploits, and attacks exist for many different purposes, and protection strategies can vary. Therefore, organizations must have a comprehensive application protection solution to defeat emerging attack types in any environment.

3. Multi-Cloud Complexity

Many businesses are steadily adopting cloud services and architectures, running their applications across multiple public, private, and hybrid clouds. The common issues of such operations are deployment complexity due to incompatibility of the underlying infrastructure and the need for a single pane of glass for traffic management and policy control.

4. Traffic is Increasing

With the emergence of mobile and cloud computing, traffic is increasing exponentially, overloading network and data center infrastructures. A10 network’s main product set derives around application delivery controllers, accelerating application performance with an A10 load balancer and ensuring server availability for these new challenging environments. As a result, application delivery controller and performance is a crucial differentiation from A10 Networks and other application delivery companies.

Before you proceed, you may find the following helpful post for pre-information:

1. Context Firewall
2. Network Configuration Automation
3. Load Balancing In Networking
4. Network Connectivity
5. Application Delivery Architecture
6. Application Delivery Network

Back to basics: With an A10 load balancer

Today’s application traffic is encrypted chiefly with SSL/TLS, which can cause performance problems. This is compounded by demand growing, and users expect a swift application response. Therefore, engineers must build reliable and scalable application services, where load balancing comes into play. Load Balancers perform traffic management that is critical in avoiding costly downtime for business applications.

What is an A10 Load Balancer? A10 Networks, Inc. is a networking vendor specializing in cloud security, threat mitigation, and traffic management. The A10 Load Balancer and Thunder Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) provide a TLS load balancing solution that can be monitored with ServicePilot.

The A10 Load Balancer is a robust and scalable solution that offers advanced traffic management capabilities. It acts as a virtual traffic manager, directing incoming network requests to the most appropriate server based on various factors such as server health, session persistence, and load-balancing algorithms. The A10 Load Balancer supports Layer 4 and Layer 7 load balancing, providing granular control over traffic distribution.

Key Features of the A10 Load Balancer:

1. Server Health Monitoring: The A10 Load Balancer continuously monitors server health by performing health checks and automatically routes traffic away from unhealthy servers, ensuring high availability of applications.

2. Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB): With GSLB functionality, the A10 Load Balancer can distribute traffic across multiple data centers or geographically dispersed servers, optimizing performance and providing fault tolerance.

3. SSL Offloading: The A10 Load Balancer supports SSL offloading, relieving the backend servers from the resource-intensive task of SSL encryption and decryption, thereby improving overall application performance.

4. Application Delivery Optimization: By leveraging advanced algorithms such as content caching, compression, and TCP optimization, the A10 Load Balancer accelerates application delivery, reducing latency and enhancing user experience.

5. Application Security: The A10 Load Balancer incorporates robust security features such as DDoS protection, web application firewall (WAF), and SSL/TLS encryption, safeguarding applications from various cyber threats.

Benefits of the A10 Load Balancer:

– Enhanced Application Performance: The A10 Load Balancer distributes traffic intelligently, ensuring optimal resource utilization and improved application response times.

– High Availability and Scalability: By distributing traffic across multiple servers, the A10 Load Balancer eliminates single points of failure, ensuring high availability and scalability of applications.

– Simplified Management: The A10 Load Balancer provides a user-friendly interface and centralized management, making it easier for administrators to configure and monitor load balancing settings.

– Cost-Effective Solution: With its efficient resource utilization and performance optimization capabilities, the A10 Load Balancer helps businesses reduce infrastructure costs while maintaining high application performance.

Use Cases of the A10 Load Balancer:

1. E-commerce Websites: The A10 Load Balancer can handle high traffic volumes, distribute load across multiple servers, and enhance application performance, making it an ideal solution for e-commerce platforms.

2. Enterprise Applications: The A10 Load Balancer ensures high availability, scalability, and security for enterprise applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and collaboration tools.

3. Cloud Environments: In cloud-based environments, the A10 Load Balancer helps distribute traffic across multiple virtual machines or containers, optimizing resource utilization and providing fault tolerance.

A10 load balancer can help you with the following:

High Availability & Performance

• Advanced layer 4–layer 7 load balancing provides high availability and business continuity for application services.
• Intelligent traffic management enables faster response using servers with optimal or customized traffic distribution, such as blue/green traffic during service maintenance.
• Application acceleration techniques and market-leading SSL/TLS performance further optimize application performance

Comprehensive Application Security

• Enhance application security centrally without requiring any server configuration changes.
• Web application firewall (WAF) and other advanced security features to protect against malware, malicious botnets, and DDoS attacks
• Enable single-sign-on (SSO) by enforcing centralized authentication.

Flexible Deployment

• Thunder ADC is a high-performance solution available in hardware and multiple software form factors.
• Thunder ADC is also available for both Public, Private clouds and in a container environment.
• Harmony Controller provides unified management and orchestration to integrate and automate applications across multiple clouds.

Automation & Analytics

• Improve operational efficiency with centralized management of policies across multiple clouds.
• Real-time, deep per-app visibility and actionable analytics for instant awareness and faster troubleshooting
• Automation for DevOps and SecOps with 100 percent API operation support

Thunder Threat Protection System (TPS)

In addition to ADCs, A10 Networks offers various security solutions. Their Thunder Threat Protection System (TPS) provides comprehensive protection against a wide range of DDoS attacks, ensuring that organizations can maintain the availability of their applications and services even in the face of large-scale attacks. A10 Networks also offers SSL Insight, a solution that decrypts SSL/TLS traffic to allow for deep inspection and analysis, helping organizations to detect and mitigate advanced threats.

Cloud is another area where A10 Networks excels. Their Thunder Convergent Firewall (CFW) is a next-generation firewall solution providing advanced security and cloud environment visibility. With support for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments, Thunder CFW enables organizations to secure their applications and data regardless of where they are hosted.

A10 Networks also recognizes the importance of analytics in driving business insights. Their Harmony Controller is a centralized management and analytics platform that provides deep visibility into application performance and security. With real-time analytics and intelligent automation, Harmony Controller helps organizations optimize their application infrastructure and proactively address any issues.

A10 Load Balancer

In 2013, A10 launched its premium platform known as the A10 Thunder product set, which consists of three major product lines. Thunder ADC is an application delivery controller, Thunder Service GCN is a Carrier Grade NAT platform, and Thunder Series TPS is a Threat Protection System. All of these run on a new Operating System called Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS).

It has been a success, and in March this year, leading service provider C4L, which has over 300 global data centers, selected A10 Networks Thunder TPS Threat Protection Systems to mitigate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The Carrier-Grade NAT platform is unique because multiple VMs are automatically spawned to serve incoming NAT requests. Instead of buying a large, expensive Carrier-Grade NAT box, the entire NAT process is scaled based on current NAT requests.

The diagram below displays feature sets for Thunder ADC ( application delivery controller.

A10 Networks Components

Application availability

Application availability ensures that application servers and networks are reliably accessible. For example, they enable your infrastructure to scale out and redirect users during an outage, using advanced layer 4-7 health checks. A10 availability services include features such as Global Server Load Balancing ( GSLB ), Carrier Grade NAT (GCN), Firewall Load Balancing ( FWLB ), and various IPv6 Transition Technologies.

SSL Security

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is used to secure TCP-based applications, such as Secure Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP, TCP port 443). Unfortunately, SSL traffic now accounts for 25% – 30% of all Internet traffic today, and attackers use encrypted traffic such as SSL to hide from detection. SSL Insight, also known as SSL forward proxy, is a feature to prevent this. SSL Insight enables security devices to inspect encrypted traffic. Once the traffic has been scrubbed, it’s encrypted and forwarded to its destination.

Application acceleration

Application acceleration improves application performance with high-performance application-aware load balancing. Acceleration products include SSL Offload, aFleX Scripting, aXAPI Custom Management, and Multi-tenancy/Virtualization. In addition, A10 employs many TCP optimization techniques to improve users’ experience. TCP optimization reduces unnecessary TCP connections by using connection reuse, dynamic window sizing, or TCP multiplexing techniques.

• TCP multiplexing 

TCP multiplexing is the ability of TCP to maintain many simultaneous processes in a single host. For distinct application processes, it uses port numbers. Together, the application process and the network address form a socket. As a result, TCP multiplexing improves the performance and capacity of servers and makes consolidation easier.

• TCP Connection reuse

TCP Connection reuse establishes persistent TCP connections with back-end servers and then reuses those connections for future TCP requests. The benefit of connection reuse is that it reduces the overhead of setting up TCP connections.

A10 Networks: Advanced core operating system (ACOS) 

Legacy systems were designed for single-core 32-bit system architecture. The industry-recent shift to multi-core architecture has strained legacy systems, causing problems with memory sharing. The old design uses Inter-Process Communication (IPC) to share memory state, which causes problems as CPU core density increases.

You get a complicated mess without a shared memory design and unnecessary replication. A10 solves these problems with ACOS. ACOS is a unique operating system that scales linearly with increased CPU core density. Scaling linearly lets you meet increased traffic demands without adding computation or memory resources.

The performance of A10 products comes from the Advanced Core Operating System ( ACOS ). They are designed to deliver substantially more excellent performance and security than prior-generation application networking products. The OS was built from the ground up on asymmetrical core multi-processor methodology. The shared memory approach removes the problem of Inter-Process Communication ( IPC) and its communication process.

The beauty of shared memory is that everyone can read. It adds intelligence to the equation by not adding overhead with an IPC architecture. It all comes down to reducing the number of bits and redundant copies that must be transferred. In addition, shared memory technology gives extra horsepower as you are not replicating in memory.

aFLeX – Advanced Scripting for Layer 4 – 7 Traffic 

Customers are using load balancing for more than just TCP and UDP services. They are looking for higher layers in the protocol stack for service enhancement. Alex allows operators to control application traffic fully. It will enable manipulation and virtual patching of the communication path for protocols such as HTTP, SIP, RADIUS, and DNS. 

aFLeX is a scripting language that works on Tool Command Language (TCL). The event-driven architecture allows customers to customize a task’s load-balancing traffic path. It gives the administration the power to script what they want, i.e., redirecting based on information in the browser. For example, suppose the end user’s browser is in Spanish.

In that case, they can get redirected to the Spanish version of the website without an extra click. aFLeX allows the creation of policies to inspect content, including request headers and payloads, performing actions such as blocking, redirecting, and modifying specific content. Scripting engines allow you to overcome individual challenges not necessarily experienced by other customers.

The performance of A10 products comes from the Advanced Core Operating System ( ACOS ). They are designed to deliver substantially more excellent performance and security than prior-generation application networking products. They built the OS from the ground up on asymmetrical core multi-processor methodology. The shared memory approach removes the problem of Inter-Process Communication ( IPC) and its communication process.

The beauty of shared memory is that everyone can read. It added intelligence to the equation by not having to add overhead with an IPC architecture. It all comes down to reducing the number of bits and redundant copies that must be transferred. In addition, shared memory technology gives extra horsepower as you are not replicating in memory.

aFLeX – Advanced scripting for layer 4 – 7 traffic 

Customers are using load balancing for more than just TCP and UDP services. They are looking for higher layers in the protocol stack for service enhancement. Alex allows operators to control application traffic fully. It will enable manipulation and virtual patching of the communication path for protocols such as HTTP, SIP, RADIUS, and DNS. 

aFLeX is a scripting language 

aFLeX is a scripting language that works on Tool Command Language (TCL). The event-driven architecture allows customers to customize a task’s load balance traffic path. It gives the power to the administration to script what they want, i.e., redirecting based on information in the browser. For example, suppose the end user’s browser is in Spanish.

In that case, they can get redirected to the Spanish version of the website without an extra click. aFLeX allows the creation of policies to inspect content, including request headers and payloads, performing actions such as blocking, redirecting, and modifying specific content. Scripting engines allow you to overcome individual challenges not necessarily experienced by other customers.

Overall, A10 Networks is a leading player in the application networking space, offering a comprehensive suite of solutions that enhance application performance, availability, and security. With their focus on security, cloud, and analytics, A10 Networks is well-positioned to help organizations navigate the complexities of today’s digital landscape. Whether it’s optimizing application delivery, protecting against DDoS attacks, securing cloud environments, or gaining actionable insights from application analytics, A10 Networks has the solutions to meet the needs of modern businesses.