30 Days of Netscaler: Day 1 Start here!
A dummies starting point for NetScaler
Good morning, it is day 1. Day one in what? Also, what do dominoes have to do with anything?
You have requested some training; things might be a bit hazy as there was a football game at the weekend and the team just didn’t turn up! However, you asked for it, honest...
Who would be a football supporter?
Anyway, the plan is to offer some pointers on NetScaler, with a series on all things related to the appliance. The goal is to provide you with enough information to be actually dangerous when talking to a customer or client. I am prepared to give you 2 minutes of material. Can I get 2 minutes of your time?
Today is all about Load balancing.
Honestly, what are you talking about?
Load balancing could be classed as somewhat unloved! Possibly, it lacks the pizazz of some slick security safety net - is Zero trust load balancing a thing?
That said, sometimes it’s the boring stuff that saves your bacon!
Load balancing is when you have an appliance that sits in front of your application servers and ensures that your users always get on to a decent box and have a great user experience, irrespective if you have some power problems in the data centre.
So what? What problem does it solve?
Load balancing can fit into so many bits of your infrastructure; the example above was related to an application of some sort. The thing is, there are many networking services that can benefit from some load-balancing love.
DNS is very handy, have you tried remembering all the IPs that you need to access online?
Who does that? :-)
Having DNS become highly available on your network is certainly something that stops your phone from going crazy because the new guy cut the uplink to the wrong rack, and name resolution just stopped working!
Who would be interested in this?
Anyone who runs a network and needs the service to be super resilient. It is common for NetScaler to be added for something internet-facing, as it allows the admin to be confident that she/he can have their workloads keep going as things ‘happen’.
Where does NetScaler fit in?
NetScaler is typically in front of the service that you run, here it is doing its magic in front of a web tier. In this case, NetScaler works out:
1. Which web server is the best for the next connection?
It knows which web server is taking the most load.
It also knows the relative performance of each server.
It also knows if the dev team has taken one out for maintenance!
2. It is also perfectly placed to offload some of the SSL loading from the web servers. This then means that your web server farm could actually be smaller, or you can scale higher with the same set of servers.
3. It can also cache content, which speeds up page load time, a big factor in e-commerce sites. As fractional increases in page latency directly impact revenue. One for the bean counters.
4. Finally, it works in conjunction with ADM to provide stats on the user experience, so the admin always knows what is going down before it does.
I’m going to the cloud, baby! We don’t need that legacy piece of equipment.
Fair point, you can go to the cloud and get your load balancing fix.
Which cloud are you in? AWS, GCP, or Azure?
They all have different tools for this, they build some slick pricing options to bill you for every little extra individually. This means that you have many different tools (and pricing options), wouldn’t a common toolset that works cross-platform (on-prem too) offer a more deterministic billing model?
NetScaler can do that.
Ok, what else?
It integrates with flexible licensing so can seamlessly draw capacity from your pool of bandwidth and flex it irrespective of what cloud you sign up for.
This sounds pretty complicated; I need a cartoon!
Ok, so it talks about Citrix ADC, and this was all about NetScaler. The name got changed, but we changed it back. No harm done, we moved on :-)
Summary.
Load balancing is the unsung hero of businesses everywhere, and is a perfect fit for running workloads in the Public cloud too.
Ultimately, it is a killer capability that is enabled with NetScaler.
What’s not to like? Stay tuned for more NetScaler Action.