Application delivery controller (ADC) company A10 Networks today rolled out a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) that allows ADCs to be spun up and down rapidly in a cloud-native fashion.

Its new Lightning Application Delivery Service (ADS) is designed to boost the delivery and security of applications across public, private, and hybrid clouds.

The new offering stems largely from A10’s recent purchase of the two-year-old startup Appcito. With Appcito, A10 picked up its cloud services controller — the element that handles orchestration of the virtualized ADC functions.

A10 also picked up Appcito CEO Kamal Anand, who is now general manager for A10’s Cloud Business Unit.

Anand says no other ADC company has Lightning ADS’ cloud-native ability. By “cloud-native” he means that it uses an elastic infrastructure, it can provision instances of itself through an API, and it can scale up and down automatically. He said other ADC companies that talk about cloud "are talking about an appliance in the cloud....and don't even come close to cloud-native."

Typically, ADCs can be delivered as hardware or software appliances to manage application workloads, but they are not cloud-native. A10’s own Thunder ADCs fall into this category. But its new Lightning ADS was purpose-built to be cloud-native itself and also to manage cloud-native applications.

A10 has also tweaked the business model for Lightning ADS. Pricing is based on the number of applications being managed, not on the number of ADC instances. The idea is for customers to cost-effectively manage public, private, or hybrid cloud deployments of applications, as well as microservices and container-based applications.

“We’ve talked to lots of CIOs of large companies that are looking for a more cloud-native solution that can run wherever their application is,” says Anand. “We are trying to not just address the technology of cloud-native, but also the business benefits.”

A10 Lightning ADS will run natively on public cloud environments such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) — an A10 partner — and on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

The new SaaS is comprised of the following components:

  • The A10 Lightning Controller, which provides central management, policy configuration, a data repository, and an analytics engine. The controller can manage ADC instances across multiple clouds.
    • The Lightning ADC software, which executes Layer 4-7 application load balancing, and security policies that are managed across diverse clouds by the Lightning Controller.
  • A self-service portal for managing the infrastructure and associated policies on a per-application basis.
  • APIs whose capabilities are available via the RESTful interface; orchestration and configuration APIs may be used to integrate with deployment automation tools like Chef, Ansible, and Jenkins.