Last week I attended the Cloud Expo Europe 2012, which was held in the Olympia exhibition hall in London. During the exhibition, I helped man the Radware booth and I also had a speaking slot in which I presented Radware’s Cloud ADC solutions for cloud service providers.
I took the time to walk around and check out the different cloud-computing vendors which were presenting in the expo. I wanted to see if they were offering application delivery services as part of the overall IaaS offering.
What I saw did not surprise me. Most of the vendors offered some form of application delivery services, either managed by the provider, managed by the customer or even something in between where the customer has partial configuration options.
In most cases, the application delivery offering was bundled as part of the hosting service, which meant customers wouldn’t necessarily know they are even getting this service. And this is where I think some of the cloud vendors are missing out.
Especially when offering cloud services to enterprises (rather than small to medium sized businesses), it is my opinion that there are opportunities for cloud providers by selling premium cloud services such as cloud based ADCs as part of their cloud services portfolio.
Specifically, in the case of cloud based application delivery controllers, Radware’s vision talks about having a dedicated cloud based ADC service per hosted/cloud customer. You may read this and say, “Is he serious?! Does he really expect the cloud provider to place a dedicated ADC for each customer?”
So no, this is not what I’m implying, but close. Using Radware’s hardware ADC virtualization solution called ADC-VX, we are now able to offer a fully functional ADC tenant per hosted customer. Using this solution, the cloud provider gains the benefits of all worlds – on the one hand the reliability and performance of a hardware solution (allowing to add additional services such as SSL offloading), but on the other hand an ADC tenant per customer. And all of this while maintaining the lowest cost per ADC instance (on a hardware solution) in the market.
For cloud providers who don’t wish to invest in a hardware solution, we also offer our Alteon VA soft ADC solution, which can also be offered per customer.
To simplify the provisioning and management of Radware’s cloud ADC offering, both solutions - ADC-VX and soft ADC - are fully integrative with the cloud providers’ provisioning systems using a set of plug-ins and SDK we call vDirect.
So as you can see, cloud providers can now expand their cloud services, by offering advanced and premium services such as application delivery services, rather than just packaging them as part of a standard offering.
These cloud based ADC services, can also provide advanced services such as caching, compression and offloading, allowing enterprises to better imitate the application delivery behavior in their local data centers, simplifying the migration of applications to the cloud.