Load-balancing appliances were all the rage in the data center, helping to ensure connectivity, maximize performance, and deal with varying compute loads. With the rise of the cloud, load balancing was quickly expected to become a thing of the past, with cloud technologies taking on the role of providing connectivity based upon traffic and compute needs.

Many adopters of cloud technologies quickly discovered that the load-balancing features incorporated into their public-cloud services were simplistic at best, useless at worst. Add to that the growth of hybrid clouds, on-premises cloud stacks and numerous other distributed cloud technologies, and it became evident that consumers of cloud instances needed more than just basic traffic-shaping and management to keep applications and services functioning adequately under varying loads.

New York City-based Kemp Technologies also observed that load-balancing conundrum and took a different approach to resolving the issues of varying load, elastic scale and most importantly, ensuring uptime and meeting the demands of users. The company ported its intellectual property developed around ADCs (application delivery controllers) into a symphony of cloud services. In other words, Kemp moved its ADC into a cloud instance that works on both the Azure Cloud and the Azure Stack, meaning that those managing public, private and hybrid clouds could regain control over how their cloud-based applications were delivered.

Load Balancing and the MSP

For MSPs, the ability to implement solutions that improve performance while also enhancing continuity offers a twofold value proposition. For example, MSPs can bring forth new availability options when supporting the Azure Cloud or the Azure Stack, both of which are critical for supporting digital transformation. As MSPs help to move legacy applications into the cloud, customers have certain expectations when it comes to performance and scale, two difficult elements that are hard to predict in an ever-changing cloud environment that incorporates hybrid- and public-cloud solutions.

Here, application-delivery controllers can make a big difference by giving MSPs the ability to provide services such as high availability and disaster recovery for critical applications that have been moved into hybrid-cloud environments. Although the Azure platform provides native, basic application load-balancing capabilities, those capabilities might come up short in hybrid environments or situations where cloud-based application pools are distributed across multiple private-cloud infrastructures.

Kemp’s aim is to enhance Azure’s native capabilities by bringing layer 7 application-delivery controls into the mix, which also enables MSPs to provide high availability across on-premises and cloud-based application pools and intelligent global traffic distribution across multiple private-cloud infrastructures. It’s a combination of services that makes Azure capable of providing highly resilient, scalable and smart application deployments.

In essence, what Kemp is doing brings additional opportunities to MSPs by enhancing Azure’s native capabilities into the world of enterprise-level application support. Ultimately, that becomes a key component for bringing digital transformation to larger enterprises.