Source: containerjournal.com
Snapt has made generally available its Nova application delivery controller (ADC) for Kubernetes clusters, which combines a local and global load balancer, web accelerator and web application firewall (WAF) in a single platform.
Company CTO Dave Blakey says Nova 2.0 is a hosted instance of an ADC service designed from the ground up to enable IT teams to natively deploy ADC functions on a Kubernetes cluster that are easier to centrally manage. Rather than deploying each ADC function provided by Nova on a separate virtual machine, Nova makes it possible to manage individual ADC services provided via Kubernetes, he says.
Previously available in beta, Nova is based on a lightweight ADC that makes it easier to observe and optimally manage east-west traffic between all the microservices that make up a Kubernetes environment.
Microservices provide a powerful way to build applications that are more flexible, resilient and potentially secure. However, many IT teams are also discovering that unless properly managed and governed, microservices can easily become too much of a good thing.
A recent survey of 200 senior IT leaders in organizations with more than 1,000 employees found on average organizations are running 184 microservices, with 60% of respondents running 50 or more. The primary reasons cited for adopting microservices are improvements to security (56%), increased development speed (55%), increased speed of integrating new technologies (53%), improved infrastructure flexibility (53%) and improved collaboration across teams (46%).
As microservices become more widely employed, many DevOps teams are struggling with how to manage them as they are updated continuously. Blakey says a Nova ADC running natively on Kubernetes provides a means to discover and analyze all those microservices.
The Nova console is accessed via a web browser so there’s no on-premises installation required. The Nova console integrates directly with public cloud environments to instantiate ADCs deployed across various networks and cloud computing platforms.
IT organizations are only charged for the nodes they connect to Nova and for the time that they use them. Snapt also makes available a free community edition without capacity limits when connected to five or fewer network nodes.
It’s now only a matter of time before IT organizations find themselves managing hundreds, possibly even thousands, of microservices. While ADCs are not necessarily a new concept, the role they play in microservices-based environments may become crucial. In the absence of some means to manage and govern microservices, many organizations would be forced to curtail their adoption. In fact, one of the reasons that many organizations continue to build and deploy monolithic applications is that microservices are too difficult to manage.
Regardless of the path forward, microservices represent of profound change to the IT status quo. It’s not clear to what degree traditional ADCs or emerging technologies such as service meshes will eventually be employed to manage and govern microservices; however, as microservices proliferate, the overall IT environment is becoming all the more complex to manage.
