Citrix ADC CPX and Citrix Ingress Controller are now available on the Azure Marketplace. Customers who want an enterprise-grade application delivery controller (ADC) can spin up Citrix ADC CPX and Citrix Ingress Controller images from Azure Marketplace to manage and control their cloud-based microservice deployments

Citrix’s cloud-native solution provides the advanced traffic management, observability, and comprehensive security features of Citrix ADCs, ensuring enterprise-grade reliability and security. Citrix ADC CPX is a container-based application delivery controller that offers load balancing and traffic management features for container-based apps. Citrix Ingress Controller is built around Kubernetes Ingress and automatically configures Citrix ADC MPX (hardware), Citrix ADC VPX (virtualized), Citrix ADC BLX (bare-metal), and Citrix ADC CPX (containerized) based on the ingress resource configuration.

With Azure Marketplace, you can find and deploy the container products with Azure Container Services such as Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The Citrix ADC CPX and Citrix Ingress Controller container images available in Azure Marketplace are certified and validated against container runtimes in Azure (like managed AKS), enabling you to build with confidence and deploy with flexibility. Azure offers various advantages including geo-replication, automated container image updates, and integrated security with Azure Active Directory for storing container images in the Azure container registry.

In this blog post, I’ll explain how to deploy Citrix container offerings using the Azure container registry in AKS.

Citrix ADC CPX Express – 20 Mbps

A container-based application delivery controller that can be provisioned on a Docker host, Citrix ADC CPX Express is a free software version that supports up to 20 Mbps and 250 SSL connections. Citrix ADC CPX Express includes the same CPX feature set you get in a licensed CPX. You don’t need a license to provision the CPX Express on AKS, and there are no usage fees. All you pay is the Azure infrastructure cost.

Azure Kubernetes Engine provides two networking modes to deploy container applications — Kubenet (Basic) networking and Azure CNI (advanced) networking. You can deploy Citrix ADC CPX as ingress proxy in both networking modes. For more information, check out our deployment guide.

Citrix Ingress Controller

Citrix Ingress Controller can automatically configure one or more Citrix ADCs (MPX/SDX/VPX/CPX/BLX) based on the ingress resource configuration. You can deploy Citrix Ingress Controller in two modes:

  • As a standalone pod to configure a Tier 1 Citrix ADC (MPX/SDX/VPX/BLX) so it can proxy North-South traffic from outside the AKS cluster to microservices deployed in AKS. You can also refer to the Citrix ADC VPX deployment guide on Azure for provisioning and configure Citrix ADC VPX on Azure as a Tier 1 ADC.
  • You can also deploy Citrix Ingress Controller as a sidecar container to Citrix ADC CPX to configure it automatically. CPX can load balance North-South or East-West microservices traffic inside the AKS. Citrix Ingress Controller is free and there are no usage fees. The only charges a user pays are the Azure infrastructure cost.

Refer to Citrix Ingress Controller deployment guide to configure Citrix ADC CPX in AKS with Basic networking mode. Refer to the Citrix Ingress Controller deployment guide to configure Citrix ADC CPX in AKS with Advanced networking mode.

Get started with Citrix ADC CPX

Visit Azure Marketplace and search for Citrix ADC CPX (see the screenshot below).

This offering will create a CPX container image in the Azure container registry that will be used in AKS CPX deployments. More details are available in the Get the CPX container image from Azure guide.

Get Started with Citrix Ingress Controller

Visit the Azure Marketplace and search for Citrix Ingress Controller (see the screenshot below).

This offering will create a Citrix Ingress Controller container image in the Azure container registry that you can use in above Citrix Ingress Controller deployment guides. More details are available in the Get the Citrix Ingress Controller container image from Azure guide.

What’s Next?

These two great offerings on the Azure Marketplace are just a start. We’re are in the process of adding different licensed versions of Citrix ADC CPX and multiple software versions of CPX and CICs. If you’re looking for specific Citrix offering on Azure marketplace, let us know. We’ll continue to cover our cloud-native-solutions in upcoming blog posts, and make sure you check out our introduction to Citrix ADC for Kubernetes and our blog post on why “multi” matters in your hybrid multi-cloud strategy.