Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 79 | Page 45

CIO OPINION infrastructure on which these cloud-native applications run , as well with the initial deployment of these applications . They have , however , struggled with the subsequent steps , such as making these applications accessible to end-users , scaling the applications up and down , or moving them from one cloud to another .
The main reason for this is that load balancers , which are used to front-end these applications , and make them accessible to end-users , were designed with monolithic applications in mind , and hence are unable to keep pace with the agile manner in which these cloud-native applications are deployed .
For example , AWS has its own Elastic Load Balancing solution , which is different from Microsoft ’ s Azure Load Balancer . This makes the task of automating application deployment even more complex and time consuming . It also makes the task of applying a consistent set of policies across the different cloud environments more error prone as each load balancer has its own separate configuration .
To keep pace with cloud-native applications , one needs an application access solution that enables the load balancer to dynamically manage new cloud-native applications as they are deployed and scaled .
These load balancers were designed for a deployment process in which network resources for the applications are provisioned manually by network and security teams , a process that could take days if not weeks , and then manually configured on the load balancer . This process clearly inhibits achieving the goal of automation to which organisations aspire .
Further compounding this problem is the fact that when deploying applications in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments , each public cloud provider has its own custom load balancer and management system .
To keep pace with cloud-native applications , one needs an application access solution that enables the load balancer to dynamically manage new cloud-native applications as they are deployed and scaled .
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