In this Part 1 video, cloudDNA co-founder, Al Taylor, details how introducing an App Delivery Controller like Citrix ADC to your Azure platform can save you time and money, whilst dramatically improving user experience.
At cloudDNA, it is a key part of our mission to find ways to make your processes and systems as efficient – in terms of both time and cost – and as effective as possible. That is why we are sharing our tips on how to get more from your Azure platform. In a five-part video series, our co-founder and CTO, Al Taylor, is examining the ways in which Citrix Cloud Networking can help to improve efficiency and reliability, reduce costs, increase security and deliver a great user experience.
Part 1 kicks us off by looking at how using the Citrix App Delivery Controller (Citrix ADC, formerly NetScaler) is an incredibly smart and widely-used method for organisations to reduce Azure hosting and operational costs, whilst improving site reliability and the user experience. Particularly in these times of increased remote working and online activity, efficiency is a key driver when looking at public cloud infrastructure. You can watch the video at the bottom of this page, but here are a few highlights to give you a taste of what is to come:
Cloud Networking can help you to get more from your Azure investment, improve efficiency from an operational perspective, and ultimately offer a better user experience.
If you are familiar with hosting services in Azure you may be aware of how quickly the server workloads, and the number of server instances you require to deliver the services you wish, can quickly increase. Take the example of hosting a web server, trying to keep it secure and improve the user experience by adding functionalities and services such as traffic optimisation, SSL encryption and compression. All of these functions increase the computational clock cycles required for each user session, ultimately leading to server sprawl and increasing the billing costs.
So, how do we turn some clock cycles off?
Take our Citrix App Delivery Controller – the ADC platform formerly known as NetScaler. This is a virtual machine that you can run in your Azure footprint, which combines delivery functionality such as load balancing, service optimisation, authentication and encryption, plus a wide range of other delivery tools often provided by web servers or individual point products, and consolidate all of that functionality into one platform. Reducing the number of machines running is the first step to cost reduction.
In addition, having all of that functionality in one platform means that you don’t have to go into individual management consoles to be able to maintain and manage your server, which allows for more efficient working in your operational overhead.
Sounds good – so, if all that functionality is moved elsewhere, how does that impact my web server?
Essentially, it gives your web server a bit of a break! By taking the workload off the web server and putting the computationally resource-intensive tasks like encryption into the ADC, each web server has to do less for each user. With less to do, web servers can manage more requests for content per second, providing a smart way to scale services without adding more server instances. With typical server workload reducing by 60% or more, Citrix ADC has been at the heart of efficient web delivery since the .com boom, and continues to power many of the worlds largest clouds to this day.
Keep an eye out for Part 2 – Security!
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If you would like to talk to us about our Citrix ADC service or any of our other products, please call 0330 010 3443 or email [email protected].
