Delivering lifesaving connectivity to users across the globe with NetScaler and Red Hat OpenShift

When your business is about providing lifesaving connectivity to users all over the globe, your applications have to be available and perform well all the time. With NetScaler, one of our largest technology customers is able to improve application delivery as it consolidates IT services into a single platform based on microservices using Red Hat OpenShift. NetScaler provides fully supported, enterprise-grade application delivery controllers (ADCs) for global server load balancing (GSLB) and traffic management in the Kubernetes environment.

Providing life and limb services for millions of users

As a company that specializes in GPS and navigation technology services for automotive, aviation, marine, outdoor, and sports activities, this organization’s critical technology is often the only link with civilization for many of its users.  

It provides IoT connectivity from millions of devices all over the globe and has evolved to provide life and limb connections to emergency services that users rely on—when difficulties occur, this SOS service is what could literally save lives.  

All of their services and connectivity rely on back-end applications, and for this industry giant, availability and performance is crucial to their business model and, sometimes, the lives of their users.  

Managing the delivery of 8,000 applications is a real challenge.  

Delivering real-time navigation services and IoT connectivity to customers is hard enough, but when these applications are created across multiple business units it can generate additional challenges, especially when it comes to maintaining their services which are built on 8,000+ applications. Applications are constantly updated to put the latest features and services in the hands of the users who need them. Before implementing NetScaler, this involved manual, time-consuming, and error-prone effort from developers to ensure the services were deployed, secured, and delivered efficiently for the best possible experience for endusers. And, with each business unit managing its own applications from creation to deployment to delivery, this was not an efficient use of resources.

Building a global platform to accelerate application delivery

In order to streamline this process, this customer decided to consolidate and centralize its IT functionality so that each business unit could focus on its core strengths—knowing what users need and providing it fast—and that the core deployment and delivery capabilities are made available in a consistent manner from a global cloud platform. This improves operational efficiency and reduces time to market for every new service.  

Given the cloud-native nature of the applications and the global presence of the business, the customer considered building their platform in the public cloud, well represented as it is across different geographies and regions with a large number of services upon which to build. However, the costs for this were prohibitively high so the decision was taken to build a private, global web platform.

NetScaler provides high availability to microservices on a global scale with Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat OpenShift was chosen as the container management system for its ease of use, automation, enterprise support, and integration with many third-party products including NetScaler. NetScaler provides seamless integration with Red Hat OpenShift’s operators for fast, easy deployment and ingress control. Only NetScaler and Red Hat OpenShift provide a consistent approach to application deployment and delivery across on-premises and cloud environments.

To guarantee the availability and performance of the services, the applications are deployed in several data centers across the globe. NetScaler provides global server load balancing for the applications so users never experience downtime from a local outage and are guaranteed a seamless experience. When a service or application within the Kubernetes environment changes or moves from one data center to another, NetScaler ADCs are automatically updated and requests are redirected, enabling uninterrupted performance.

While other ADC vendors claim similar GSLB capability, implementation often proves complex and requires multiple solutions to work together, with many unsupported, open source components. NetScaler’s two decades of ADC innovation has led to a seamless, straightforward GSLB solution that is well understood, fully supported, and works without any manual interference. This ease of use is a real differentiator for the customer because it makes the initial deployment simpler and allows the customer to expand their operations anywhere in the world to improve coverage, performance, and availability at the drop of a hat.  

NetScaler inside the Kubernetes cluster for more consistency and better scalability and management

Load balancing is a critical part of microservices and Kubernetes. And, like many businesses on the Kubernetes journey, the customer originally deployed the default, open source load balancer HA Proxy to control traffic within their clusters.  

However, they found that HA Proxy lacked some important features, the forwarding rules were poorly understood, and the HA Proxy architecture had limitations in its scaling capabilities, all of which made the infrastructure difficult to manage.  

Moreover, the customer found that whenever changes were made to HA Proxy, there would be a momentary disconnection of all sessions. This, combined with the poor visibility into telemetry and lack of enterprise support, made troubleshooting issues very difficult.

It was a logical step to replace HA Proxy inside the Kubernetes cluster with NetScaler’s containerized form factor, NetScaler CPX. Not only does this solve the scalability and management issues, but also provides operational consistency between the external GSLB ADCs and the internal ADCs because all NetScaler form factors use the same code base. This means the same features and functionality are available inside and outside the cluster and implemented in the same way. Additionally, it reduced the training needed as only a single skill set was required across the board.

Enterprise support and more

NetScaler is fully supported with 24/7 access provided across the globe. Representatives are always ready to help customers with NetScaler issues, which is a real plus for this customer as they embark on their new web platform initiative. Like so many businesses building out Kubernetes environments for the first time, engagement with NetScaler engineering teams, with their vast experience in helping similar businesses, has proven invaluable as they are able to provide solid guidance on best practices for application deployment, delivery and security of Kubernetes environments.  

In this particular case, NetScaler engineers collaborated to provide automation for key features. For example, NetScaler added single-click support for HTTP-HTTPS redirect and wild card domain TLS termination, both of which help this IoT technology company with security compliance. Both of these features also reduce operational overhead and accelerate application deployment.

NetScaler: Improving experience for admins and users

Delivering always-on connectivity to millions of users across the globe is not an easy task. It relies on applications and services being available, secured, and delivered seamlessly. In this case, because of its seamless integration, NetScaler was an obvious choice to complement the Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes deployment.

NetScaler’s advanced GSLB provides the level of availability over multiple regions so that users are sent to the best-performing data center for their location. Moreover, for the developer, deployment is automated from within the Kubernetes environment, making it simple and error-free, as well as making future expansion easy. Additionally, NetScaler’s certified integration with Red Hat OpenShift meant that deploying NetScaler inside the OpenShift environment was as simple as a single click, further enhancing and accelerating the application deployment process.

The response from the users has been outstanding. NetScaler’s one-pass architecture means that processing requests is faster and applications perform better, enhancing the overall user experience. NetScaler’s superior telemetry provides greater visibility and more insight into the applications as well as easier troubleshooting. Now, when something goes awry, NetScaler provides single-pane-of-glass management enabling the company to see exactly what happened and why something isn’t working in real-time, so it can be fixed quickly.  

Without NetScaler this IoT technology company would not be able to provide reliable life and limb services and IoT connectivity to the users that depend on them every day.