Go beyond load balancing to deliver modern apps more efficiently

Your ideal load balancer is an ADC

Say “load balancer” and many still think of a traditional hardware appliance. While hardware load balancers are the right choice for some use cases, modern applications running in the cloud require a high degree of automation that traditional load balancers cannot provide.

As companies have moved their applications to the cloud, there has been a rapid shift from load balancers to software-based application delivery controllers (ADCs). So while load balancing remains a critical function for application delivery, ADCs offer that and so much more.

Executive summary

Modern applications running in the cloud require a high degree of automation that traditional load balancers cannot provide.
As companies modernize their application architectures and move workloads to the cloud, their applications and APIs become more vulnerable to attacks.
Citrix ADC gives IT operational consistency and holistic visibility, beyond what a traditional load balancer would provide.

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Business outcomes

Deliver your apps consistently across multi-cloud

Most enterprises—93 percent—have a multi-cloud strategy, and 87 percent are taking a hybrid approach, combining private and public clouds¹. Because Citrix ADC is built on a single code base, you get operational consistency across all environments and applications regardless of ADC form factor. You can streamline application delivery, ensure high availability, and optimize costs by automatically scaling ADC capacity as demand peaks and declines. With Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB), you can globally distribute ADCs across cloud regions and availability zones to minimize latency and provide an optimal end-user experience.

Simplify your journey to microservices

To innovate faster, many companies are exploring the benefits of a cloud-native approach to application architecture. If your company has started this journey, you’ve likely discovered that load balancing requirements for microservices-based applications are much more complex compared to monolithic applications. With Citrix ADC, you can provision a container-based ADC instance on a Docker host for load balancing and traffic management to achieve better performance and scale for large Kubernetes clusters, including lower memory footprint and lower latency. And it works seamlessly across on-premises and cloud environments.

Protect your applications and APIs

As companies modernize their application architectures and move workloads to the cloud, their applications and APIs become more vulnerable to attacks that traditional network-layer security defenses are unable to detect or prevent. With the expanded attack surface that comes with multi-cloud adoption and the shift to microservices-based applications, it can be challenging to ensure a consistent security posture. Citrix ADC wards off attacks by acting as a reverse proxy, intercepting, and monitoring communications to prevent malicious access and providing comprehensive application and API protection—including protection against the OWASP Top 10 threats². And with Citrix Web App and API Protection service, you can expand that layered protection with an advanced web application firewall (WAF), bot management, and volumetric DDoS protection to help you maintain a consistent security posture.

Gain actionable insights across multi-cloud

Managing delivery of monolithic and microservices-based applications can be challenging. Citrix ADC gives you holistic visibility across multi-cloud, beyond what a traditional load balancer would provide, to effectively manage and monitor application health, security, and performance. With this single pane of glass, you gain actionable insights for faster troubleshooting. So you can perform multi-dimensional application health monitoring across layers 2-7 to ensure high availability.