Zeus Traffic Manager for Cloud Hosting Providers

Cloud Hosting Providers use a shared, virtualized infrastructure to host servers and related infrastructure (storage, network) for their customers.

A cloud provider will seek to leverage large economies of scale and lower operational costs by standardizing on common infrastructure (typically x86-hardware and virtualization) and common processes to deploy, scale and manage customers’ services.

Load Balancing in the Cloud

Load balancing is often provided as a service to customers, using basic self-care interfaces or even manual change-request processes to manage the load balancing configuration of shared network infrastructure.

Load balancing offerings are generally basic, balancing traffic to a front-end virtual IP across a set of nominated back-end IP addresses. Customers don’t get access to any of the advanced traffic management and visualization features of the shared load balancer or application delivery controller used to provide the service.

Zeus Traffic Manager gives a cloud provider a clear competitive advantage.

With Zeus software and Zeus’ SPLA licensing program, a cloud provider can easily and cost-effectively offer every customer a dedicated application delivery solution. 

Every customer receives full control of a dedicated ADC system running directly on the cloud infrastructure

Zeus software much more than a shared load balancing service can:

• Full application health monitoring, persistence and content-based routing
• Rate shaping, bandwidth control and service level monitoring
• Caching, Compression and SSL offload
• SSL encryption to secure traffic over shared cloud infrastructure
• Full control and visibility of application traffic
• Complete rules language to specify traffic management policies

Comparing Features and Capabilities

	Zeus Traffic Manager	Hardware ADC
Infrastructure required	Leverages the existing infrastructure investment and the processes developed to support it	Separate infrastructure investment; proprietary processes to manage it must be developed e.g. custom self-care interface
Deployment of new service	Full-featured ADC service deployed exactly as any other pre-package virtual machine	Limited load balancing service; must be configured on shared ADC system by manual or self-care process
Scaling capacity up (e.g. new customers, increased demand)	Capacity scaled up using core cloud infrastructure	Will require purchase of additional ADC hardware when performance limits reached
Scaling capacity down (e.g. customer proof-of-concept ends)	Resources can be redeployed for other purposes	Single-purpose hardware resources can only be redeployed for other ADC needs
Cost and return on investment	Free and Pay-per-Use (SPLA) licensing minimised up-front investments and matches cloud provider’s revenue model	Initial investment must be recovered and profit made before hardware becomes obsolete (typically 3 years)