Zeus Traffic Manager for Cloud Application Developers and System Architects

Scalable, dynamic applications require an advanced load balancer or Application Delivery Controller (ADC) to route and manage network traffic to the application, far beyond the capabilities of basic layer-4 load balancing provided by most cloud vendors.

Zeus Traffic Manager is a software ADC that can be deployed in a private datacenter, on a physical server or in a virtual environment, and then migrated to any off-site cloud provider. 

Contemporary hardware ADCs were designed with the needs of the physical datacenter and the network manager in mind.  Zeus Traffic Manager is the only ADC that is designed to meet the needs of the application in any test or production environment. It’s a software application, so it is managed and deployed like any other software service, and it can be configured and controlled using scripts written in Zeus’ TrafficScript^TM language, or via Java Servlets.

If you are building an application in a physical datacenter, with a view to moving or bursting to a cloud provider in the future, keep several considerations in mind:

• Scaling: Design your application to scale out (more virtual machines), not up (more powerful servers) so that you can take advantage of the scalability model of your cloud provider;

• Tiering: Move away from the traditional 3-tier style of applications as favored by common J2EE architectures, where the application is broken into functional tiers (web, business, database).  Instead, architect your application to scale using multiple, identical virtual machines with minimal interdependencies. Not only will this improve performance by reducing network transactions between virtual machines, it will be much easier to deploy and scale if your application load varies significantly;

• Bursting and Migration: If you anticipate moving workloads on demand – cloud peering to reduce costs, or cloud bursting to absorb traffic spikes – take the ‘Tiering’ recommendation to its limit and ensure that your application can comfortably run from two or more locations simultaneously, with minimal network traffic between each;

• Hardware Dependencies: Seek to standardize on software alternatives to tasks traditionally performed by hardware appliances, particularly if those tasks are critical to the operation of your application. Such appliances include Load Balancers and ADCs, Search Appliances, Firewalls and other security devices. Hardware appliances will tie your application down to a physical location, but software alternatives can be moved from location to location with the application.

Zeus Traffic Manager is the ideal application delivery solution for applications that are built to run on the Cloud.

• Flexible licensing: Free Evaluation licenses and the Desktop Edition support development environments, and full Zeus Traffic Manager software licenses can be deployed and migrated between any cloud provider’s infrastructure, avoiding vendor or platform lock-in;

• Reduced cost: Zeus software application acceleration and caching capabilities can reduce the number of virtual machines and resources required to serve your users, thus saving money on cloud hosting costs;

• Rapid Application Development: Zeus software helps you build flexible, scalable applications more quickly and with fewer resources. The powerful, scriptable traffic management and transformation capabilities simplify and standardize your network traffic, making it easier to support multiple clients and multiple generations of applications.  Zeus Traffic Manager's intelligent traffic management policies can even be used to run production, test and development systems on the same infrastructure if desired;

• Precise and trackable scalability: Zeus Traffic Manager’s Service Level Monitoring capability accurately measures the performance of your cloud-based application, giving you the management information you need to make informed decisions about when to scale out your capacity.

Zeus software will ensure the rapid and successful delivery of your application to your users, no matter what infrastructure you run your application on. 

Zeus Traffic Manager is not an anchor - it does not tie your application software down to a single physical location. Zeus software can become a valuable and integral part of your application, no matter where it is located.

Gilt Groupe operate a successful members-only shopping community, featuring rapid sales of luxury lifestyle and fashion goods. Their massively-scalable retail applications are hosted on a cloud platform and they depend keenly on Zeus Traffic Manager to manage and accelerate their applications, no matter how heavily their traffic climbs during their online events:

 

Traffic spikes dramatically for several hours once a sale event commences

"We found that with Content Caching and TrafficScript™, Zeus Traffic Manager is much more than a great load balancer – Zeus Traffic Manager is really an extension of our applications because of what it enables us to do."

Phong Nguyen, VP R&D, Founder, Gilt Groupe