Five Reasons a Business Needs APIs (and an API Driven Strategy)
The advent of network functions virtualization (NFV) is clearly the next big thing in networking. Rather than having to deploy a dizzying array of physical appliances to manage every little network service, NFV turns those functions into software that can run on standard commodity processors.
One of the first instances of an NFV offering comes in the form of an application delivery controller (ADC), otherwise known as a load balancer, from KEMP Technologies.
KEMP has been aggressively moving into network virtualization for some time, so the KEMP Condor with HyperFlex Architecture is a natural extension of the company’s existing strategy. The difference now is that as an NFV, IT organizations can more easily embed load balancing functionality directly within their applications.
Atchison Frazer, chief marketing officer for KEMP Technologies, says that developers prefer to have direct control of the load balancing function themselves instead of being dependent on gaining access to a physical load balancer. As for the IT organization, an NFV means that every application could have its own embedded load balancing capability, which would give IT one less thing to worry about in a networking world that is already too complicated to manage.
Just about every vendor that makes a networking or security appliance will be making a shift to NFVs in the months ahead. As the next logical extension of creating a virtual appliance, an NFV can be configured with application programming interfaces (APIs) that make it as programmable as any other piece of software. In fact, the whole shift to software-defined networking (SDN) is arguably going to be dependent on the existence of NFVs.
From an IT perspective, NFVs represent a major opportunity to eliminate the need to provision, deploy, manage and power a raft of physical appliances that today clutter enterprise networking. Naturally, it will take some time for this shift to occur, but once it does, the world of enterprise networking should be a much better place.
