Guest post by Dave Blakey, Co-Founder and CEO of Snapt

The goal with Snapt, which I co-founded in 2012 with my fellow South African Douglas Cherry, was always to be radically different and extraordinarily innovative. With offices in Cape Town, South Africa and Atlanta, Georgia, we are trusted by large-scale customers like NASA and Target to solve their unique application delivery controller (ADC) requirements, but with a model that is accessible to everyone from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies.

The need for ADC solutions has never been greater. With the advent of social media, the sharing economy, high-resolution images of all kinds and for all purposes, IoT, 5G networks, globally integrated knowledge economies, increased digital security threats, and big data ecommerce—just to name a few forces—data transactions are increasing in volume and complexity and the need to manage the critical network infrastructure that all these transactions pass through is only increasing.

The foundation of Snapt is to make a product that’s easy-to-use, will be able to run in tomorrow’s networks, and adds real daily value to the applications it manages, through modern models, ease of use and deployment, and the always-on, ever-changing needs and nature of DevOps.

So what’s going on, exactly?

ADCs primarily consist of a load balancer, web accelerator, and web application firewall for business-critical services, particularly web traffic. These solutions optimize performance, allow complex scaling rulesets, and provide security to important components of your infrastructure.

The goal is to ensure the main objectives of critical infrastructure, including:

• The need to improve the security of data and servers
• The need to improve the performance of critical services
• The need to ensure uptime of critical business services
• The need to drive business costs down and reduce TCO

Existing ADC vendors are delivering new solutions built on 20-year-old architecture. People are paying for overhead, costs, and support to bridge that gap. Resource-intensive solutions with complicated and unnecessary systems are being patched into ingress controllers and virtual environments.

Why is this happening?

DevOps has brought a new view of network architecture design, thinking, and standards as a result of a new breed of products and organizational needs. This brings with it added complexities from a deployment, standards, disaster recovery, and management perspective which requires ADC solutions that are agile, powerful, secure and at an extremely disruptive price. The gulf, quite simply, is that DevOps and their needs have changed the game, as well as how applications are being delivered, complicating things even further.

The person now responsible for this is completely different today than it was previously. In the past, a network engineer who specialized in load balancing would control the load balancer and provide service to other departments. Today, a multi-disciplinary DevOps engineer is usually in charge, or someone very similar to that person. The responsibility is to ensure the performance, security, and reliability of the service.

However, the products that provide these services haven’t been changing to meet the needs of the environments and DevOps-led positions, something that we intend to continue to lead the change in.

In particular, the ADC market is changing largely based on the nature of network architecture in response to growing data, security concerns and new protocols that define how applications run on the network. With more and more enterprises turning to software-based ADC solutions, our best-in-class products and services are designed to improve and protect a clients’ virtual infrastructure while delivering business-critical applications anytime, anywhere, on any device, platform or cloud-based infrastructure. We work with companies globally to ensure their websites and services are always online.

The ADC today needs to stay out of the way of engineers and enable their application delivery. The same ADC needs to be able to run in a lightweight container and micro-service environment.

How do we do this?

We are unique in a market of predominantly legacy vendors. Snapt allows DevOps to focus on optimizing, enhancing and building on any network and any environment—all while allowing their critical infrastructure to remain safe and secure. Built around modern models, use-cases, with ease of use and deployment, the flexibility of environments and user empowerment is key. Snapt ADC powers some of the largest tech companies and startups in the world. Our customers span e-commerce, digital publishing, EdTech, science, banking, and government. In short, Snapt is always looking to the future, to the environments, networks and use cases where critical infrastructure needs to be easily deployed and managed, to allow for peace of mind for DevOps, and beyond.