Container-based load balancing with Citrix ADC CPX and CPX Express

Citrix ADC CPX is a container-based application delivery controller that can be provisioned on a Docker host.

CPX allows you to:

Leverage Docker engine capabilities and Citrix ADC load balancing and traffic management features for container-based applications.
Deploy one or more CPX instances as standalone instances on a Docker host. A CPX instance provides throughput of up to 1 Gbps.
Deliver exceptional application performance with multi-core CPX as an ingress device to handle North-South traffic for popular cluster management tools such as Kubernetes.

Citrix ADC CPX Express is the free developer version that supports up to 20 Mbps and 250 SSL connections. CPX Express supports most of the CPX feature set, except TCP optimization and L7 DDoS.

Compare CPX Express and CPX vs. NGINX and HA Proxy

Feature	Citrix ADC CPX	Citrix ADC CPX Express	HA Proxy	NGNIX
Load balancing algorithms	Multiple algorithms & persistence methods	Multiple algorithms & persistence methods	Limited load balancing options	Limited load balancing options
In service upgrade with zero down time			
TCP optimization	
Management and analytics	Integrated solution through Citrix Application Delivery Management	Integrated solution through Citrix Application Delivery Management	No integrated solution	Supported through cloud-based application

Everything you need to load-balance your microservices and containerized apps

High concurrency

Citrix ADC CPX is optimized for high TCP session count and high HTTP response-per-second performance.

Application-savvy load balancing

Load balancing is at the heart of CPX. Unlike Round Robin and hash-based load balancing, Citrix Networking CPX algorithms consider the actual load and send traffic to the least-loaded containerized app. You can integrate Layer 7 policies required for deploying a service, and you can apply policies to both ingress and egress traffic. These policies can redirect a connection based on HTTP data, rewrite an HTTP request or response, and switch a connection to a specific app based on HTTP payload, HTTP header, or IP address range. You can combine load balancing with DNS service groups or use Citrix ADC CPX as a DNS service.

Service discovery and auto-configuration

Citrix ADC has built-in support for service discovery. Citrix Application Delivery Management ties into Mesos, Marathon, and Kubernetes, and acts as a CPX controller. It auto-configures CPX to changes in the app topology. You can automate the configuration of CPX to load-balance any type of app through Stylebooks—declarative templates that reside in Citrix Application Delivery Management.

Integrated management and analytics

Citrix Application Delivery Management acts a controller, orchestration point, and analytics platform for Citrix ADC CPX. You can manage multiple CPXs at scale and get immediate visibility to the health of apps and microservices. CPX streams its internal counters and transaction logs to Citrix Application Delivery Management. Several built-in insights provide detailed reporting on user experience, security, and SSL. You can manage CPXs as a fleet through Citrix Application Delivery Management, with automated per-instance configuration and SSL certificates management. With Citrix Application Delivery Management as a controller, you can tie in to orchestration systems, SDN controllers, or overlay network solutions to insert CPX into routed or host-network topologies.

DDoS mitigation

Citrix ADC CPX has proven algorithms to manage attacks that exploit weaknesses in TCP, HTTP, and DNS. By using CPX for all app-to-app traffic, you can protect apps from DDoS attacks from the outside and inside.

SSL offload

Deploy SSL/TLS with the most secure ciphers, such as elliptical curve cryptography. Mandate specific ciphers across all load balancers by using Citrix Application Delivery Management SSL certificate management tools. CPX can aggregate connections to backend servers to optimize performance and secure the connection to the backend apps by re-encrypting connections. You can push your apps to the cloud or separate production from pre-production traffic with confidence.