A10 brings container-native load balancing and analytics for Kubernetes

A10 Networks is introducing an automated way to integrate enterprise-grade load-balancing with application visibility and analytics.

The new A10 Ingress Controller for Kubernetes, which integrates with A10’s container-native load balancing and application delivery solution, can automatically provision application delivery configuration and policies. It ties directly into the container lifecycle to automatically update application delivery configuration with the dynamism of a Kubernetes environment. As application services scale up and down, the A10 load balancer is dynamically updated. A10's "Lightning" containerized load balancer also scales up and down automatically with the scale of a Kubernetes cluster.

The A10 Ingress Controller can run anywhere Kubernetes is deployed, including public clouds (Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine (GCP), and private clouds (running VMware and bare metal infrastructure). 

A10 said its solution provides comprehensive application analytics by collecting hundreds of application metrics, thus enabling operations teams to troubleshoot faster, manage capacity planning and also detect performance and security anomalies. The analytics data is available via dashboards on the A10 Harmony portal or via APIs.

“As application teams adopt container and microservice architectures, Kubernetes has become the de-facto standard for container orchestration,” said Kamal Anand, Vice President of Cloud, A10 Networks. “A10’s Kubernetes solution provides enterprise applications teams with container-native enterprise grade application delivery for their mission-critical applications. With bundled monitoring, traffic analytics and application security, it reduces their operational burden and allows them to focus on core application value.”

“The transition to software containers, micro-segmented application architectures, and DevOps practices is underway, making it imperative that ADCs can be easily included in these applications and orchestrated along with containers by container management software such as Kubernetes,” said Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., senior research director and advisor of cloud and data center research practice for IHS Markit, a global business information provider. “For 2017 we estimated revenue from commercial license of container software at $350 million, with revenue over $1.2 billion forecast for 2022, signaling a strong need for application delivery ecosystems to support containers. A10’s focus on integrating its ADC software Kubernetes container management software answers an important market requirement.”

“IDC finds that enterprises are increasingly adopting cloud-native containers and microservices. A challenge for those enterprises, though, is ensuring that the right application-delivery infrastructure is deployed to facilitate the agility, elasticity, flexibility, security, and scale that production environments require. At the edge of a Kubernetes cluster, the ingress controller provides important functionality – applying rules to Layer 7 routing to allow inbound connections to reach cluster services – and its integration with enterprise-grade application-delivery infrastructure, such as A10’s containerized load balancer and controller, makes considerable sense” said Brad Casemore, Research VP, Datacenter Networks, IDC.