Faster application development and deployment are the new mantras for IT, Digital, and DevOps teams. Microservices are the emerging application architecture. As customers make this migration, they will do so in steps —beginning with a static architecture in which containers are deployed manually — then ultimately moving to a robust, automated architecture with service discovery, resource management and orchestration.

Citrix customers now are making this journey with an end goal of deploying their new applications in a Kubernetes environment. To ensure that the journey is as smooth as possible, Citrix announced an integration between NetScaler and Kubernetes earlier this year. The integration enables DevOps professionals and members of IT teams to move to a microservices architecture as seamlessly as possible. The integration of NetScaler with Kubernetes as an ingress controller provides NetScaler’s rich Layer 7 feature set for North-South traffic. We have added NetScaler Management & Analytics System (MAS) as a NetScaler controller to allow NetScaler CPX, VPX, MPX and SDX to serve as an ingress controller thus giving companies many options to accelerate the deployment of the new microservices architecture.

The Story Gets Even Better

With the new Kubernetes release, the integration story gets even better. How much better?

  • More flexible options for North-South traffic handling: Enterprises now have a choice of more form factors for application delivery. They can either choose the high-performance multi-core CPX containerized platform, a virtual machine-based solution, or leverage their existing appliance inventory. All options run the same code base, API, and Layer 7 security measures, providing a consistent application delivery experience across all application workload types.
  • High-performance SSL and TLS: SSL/TLS data encryption has become the universally accepted standard for securing sensitive data in transit across the internet. NetScaler transparently accelerates the SSL transactions by offloading SSL processing from the application servers and doing it with most stringent ciphers.
  • End-to-End visibility and analytics: NetScaler MAS provides industry-leading hybrid cloud traffic visibility and application-centric infrastructure management. It provides a simple indicator to administrators with application health scores that summarize how well an application is performing based on industry standard APDEX scoring of user satisfaction. The app health measurements are based on machine-guided learning that spots anomalies with data coming directly from all NetScalers. In addition, the same data sets provide performance metrics and assessment of security threats.
  • Comprehensive content switching, rewrite, rate limiting and responder: NetScaler has a rich Layer 7 feature set that can be applied across ingress and egress HTTP/S traffic. As customers migrate their monolithic workloads to a microservices architecture, they will need the Layer 7 flexibility available from NetScaler to run their applications in production.

Don’t just take our word for it. Give it a try!

Go ahead. We know you want to do it. Kick the tires and see how awesome this integration truly is!

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