A10 Networks Turns ADC into Cloud Operating System

Embracing the Software-Defined Future: Looking Ahead at 2015

Making a case for application delivery controller (ADC) technology as the foundation of a cloud operating system, A10 Networks today unveiled an A10 Harmony framework for programming its Thunder ADCs along with an upgrade to the operating system that runs on top of them.

Paul Nicholson, director of product marketing at A10 Networks, says the A10 Harmony framework now exposes via a RESTful application programming interface (API) a Policy Engine through which IT organizations can not only provision the Thunder ADCs, but also secure them and access a variety of analytics capabilities.

Version 4.0 of ACOS, meanwhile, adds support for secure interconnect IPsec VPN, SSL Insight, Application Access Management (AAM) and a Web Application Firewall (WAF).

Nicholson says that as IT organizations move to deploy ADCs from A10 Networks on premise and in the cloud, a federated ability to manage distributed IT resources starts to emerge. The challenge, says Nicholson, is that most IT organizations at present are not fully aware of the capabilities of programmable ADCs. In fact, all too often, Nicholson says that too many IT organizations tend to restrict the usage of ADCs to traditional load balancing functions within a single data center environment.

In essence, A10 Networks is turning IT infrastructure into a set of services that IT organizations can now manage at a higher level of abstraction using RESTful APIs. That means that rather than having to manage every API implementation put forward by an IT infrastructure vendor or cloud service providers, the ADC becomes the central hub through which all IT resources become programmable via a single RESTful API implementation.

Of course, that all assumes that IT organizations have the programming skills needed to master those APIs. But like most things in IT, that’s now only a matter of time and patience.