Business operations depend heavily on web-based applications—from collaboration platforms to e-commerce sites. Reliable, high-speed application connectivity is essential for maintaining productivity and meeting customer expectations. Application delivery controllers (ADCs) are used to enhance performance, manage traffic, enable load balancing, and handle SSL offloading. But, in multi-cloud environments, traditional ADCs often run into limitations that can complicate deployment and performance.
By understanding the limitations and challenges posed by ADCs, organizations can improve their digital infrastructure to provide the application experience that users need.
What is the Function of an Application Delivery Controller?
An Application Delivery Controller (ADC) acts as a bridge between client machines and web servers or enterprise applications, managing and optimizing how users access these applications. ADCs boost application performance by distributing incoming traffic across several servers to improve availability, scalability, and reliability.
Some typical features include:
- Load balancing: spreading incoming traffic over multiple servers to prevent any single server from getting overwhelmed, often including application-level Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) mitigation and web content optimization
- Caching: storing selected origin server data so that the servers can handle other tasks, optimizing resource use, and improving server efficiency
- Compression: reducing data’s size to make data transmission more efficient, reducing load times
- Offloading SSL/TLS processing: managing HTTPS processes to reduce server CPU usage, boosting server efficiency, and simplifying SSL certificate management across multiple servers
What is the Difference between a Load balancer and an Application Delivery Controller?
While load balancers and ADCs both manage network traffic, they serve different purposes.
Load balancers distributed user requests across multiple servers to ensure website availability and scalability. ADCs go beyond load balancing to serve as a bridge for user-to-application and application-to-application traffic, improving application security and performance.
To learn more about load balancing, check out Load Balancing Matchup: Weighted Round Robin vs. Round Robin.
What are the Limitations of Application Delivery Controllers?
In complex IT environments, ADC faces some significant limitations that may impact the organization’s reason for deploying them.
Struggles with Multi-cloud Infrastructure
ADCs need visibility into application performance across platforms to function well. In a multi-cloud environment, the ADC needs to manage traffic across various clouds, which is difficult. ADCs must seamlessly fit into an overarching infrastructure for optimal performance and security.
Unstable Application Delivery and Security
With agile development practices, updating application code demands fast modifications in routing and security policies that can destabilize ADCs. Additionally, traditional ADS are often hardware-based which can lead to bottlenecks that slow down development and delivery.
Labor-intensive Change Management Processes
The ADC change management process is often manual, which can delay service delivery, especially for time-sensitive requests. In complex ADC infrastructures, manual processes create even more challenges because they can lead to error or cause service outages. Since effective change management is critical to maintaining service availability, ADCs can lead to reduced service quality and create inefficiencies.
Decentralized Architectures
A decentralized ADC architecture can cause tool sprawl that complicates compliance and security. When multiple teams use their ADC instances, they increase vulnerability risks because a lack of centralized monitoring makes proactive issue resolution difficult. Further, diverse ADS setups can lead to inefficiencies and service disruptions, negatively impacting performance and user experience.
Using DNS to Improve Application Delivery
In a complex, multi-cloud environment, an ADC may not provide the application performance that an organization needs to ensure continuous delivery.
Efficient Load Balancing
Directional DNS provides advanced load-balancing capabilities by sending visitors to specific servers based on their geographic location or IP address. By delivering content to end users from the servers closest to them, directional DNS services improve application performance and the end-user experience.
Improved Authentication and Authorization
A centralized DNS management solution enhances authentication and authorization processes by routing traffic to the correct authentication servers. While ADCs can serve as a central authentication point, DNS ensures that this layer remains resilient against the cyber threats targeting the authentication servers.
Utilizing DNS to manage authentication and authorization can offer broader visibility into network-level threats. While an ADC can aid application-level security, the DNS interfaces with various components of the network infrastructure to
Traffic Management
The UltraDNS Traffic Controller routes traffic to and from networks to improve network efficiency and reduce latency, providing better application delivery in a multi-cloud environment. It effectively distributes traffic to multiple servers, enhancing application delivery reliability compared to ADCs that may rely on server-side processing. By utilizing DNS as a traffic management tool, organizations can mitigate server overload and ensure continuous application availability, which is often a challenge faced by application delivery controllers under high demand.
Discover how UltraDNS optimizes traffic using advanced traffic direction.
Security Protection
A robust DNS infrastructure provides better security protection against DDoS attacks than an ADC does. While ADC may provide security functionalities at the application layer, DNS sits at the lower network layer, making it more effective at reducing a DDoS attack’s impact. During a DDoS attack, the servers become overwhelmed and unable to return responses. DNS that provides automatic failover will redirect traffic and maintain service availability to prevent business and service interruption.
Learn more about UltraDNS Sitebacker, which continually monitors primary and standby servers from multiple sites within UltraDNS’s global Managed DNS infrastructure.
Vercara: Directional DNS to Enhance Performance and User Experience
Vercara’s UltraDNS Directional DNS optimizes application delivery by improving speed, functionality, and reliability. With our Directional DNS, you can create granular geographical targeting by selecting from over 3,500 different locations around the globe. Combining locations, creating customized grouping, or restricting access enables you to shape your traffic more effectively and maintain continued service availability.
Vercara intelligently routes traffic at the DNS level and routes traffic to the closest geographic host. Our fully hosted solution means you can easily deploy and use Directional DNS without upskilling staff or investing in software and hardware.
To learn how Vercara can improve your application service delivery, contact us today for a demo.
