CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

Top 3 US Cable Company Deploys Avi Networks

Load Balancer for OpenStack Private Cloud

100% REST API, Self-Service and Elastic ADC Accelerates App Development
Industry: Media and Entertainment
Business Drivers:
Accelerate all aspects of
application development and
deployment
Reduce IT costs, especially related
to infrastructure provisioning
Empower application developers
to perform tasks previously
requiring skilled IT personnel
Eliminate downtime when scaling
capacity to address business
needs
Solution:
Multi-location, OpenStack-Kilobased private cloud
Avi Networks: elastic load balancing,
security, and application analytics
solution
Fully integrated with OpenStack
and automation tools such as
Puppet
Enterprise-grade ADC features
not offered by open source
alternatives
SDN design with centralized
controller and distributed, elastic
data plane

Customer Background
The customer is among the top three US cable companies in the US, with annual revenues in the
tens of billions of dollars. It delivers digital cable, cable Internet, digital phone, home security,
and cable advertising products and services. Their OpenStack-based multi-location private
cloud must satisfy the needs of a large group of application developers, spread across many
teams, who are collectively responsible for hundreds of internal and external applications. To
meet evolving business requirements and continually improve their applications, developers
must be able to deploy applications rapidly and efficiently. Working with the internal application
developers, the central IT group implemented a multi-data center private cloud using
OpenStack and goaled to significantly accelerate application development and deployments.

Technical Requirements
To boost application availability and security, as well as support their agile business, the IT team
found it essential to incorporate Load-Balancing-as-a-Service (LBaaS) into their OpenStack
cloud. Key requirements included:
1. Fully automated, self-service ADC provisioning via the OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon).
2. Enterprise-grade load balancing features, including the support for high availability (HA),
SSL offload, and multi-tenancy with centralized identity management (Keystone).
3. Each tenant (one for each of the application development teams, total apps numbering in
the hundreds) needed to be able to deploy applications, complete with ADC functionality,
on its own, isolated from other tenants, and governed by its own per-tenant SLA.
4. To automate solution deployment, the central IT also required full integration with Puppet.

Benefits:
Provisioning time for ADCs
with application performance
monitoring features dramatically
reduced from days (sometimes
weeks) to minutes
Application developers now
empowered to identify and solve
application performance issues in
minutes from a single OpenStack
dashboard
Significant savings in OPEX are
anticipated, compared to previous
legacy ADC appliance model
Figure 1: Avi Networks integrated with OpenStack Dashboard
1

Top 3 US Cable Company Deploys Avi Networks Load Balancer for OpenStack Private Cloud
IT Team

Lines of Business (LOB) /

App Tenants

Success Story

Avi UI

Private Cloud

Application
Developers

Single, central
point of policy
definition and
management,
100% REST API

Tenant #1

Avi Service
Engine

Tenant #2
Avi Controller
Tenant #3

OpenStack
Dashboard

Avi Service
Engine

Figure 2: Schematic of OpenStack-based private cloud with Avi Networks ADC

ADC/Load Balancer Options Considered

Open source LBaaS solutions such as HAProxy lacked enterprisegrade features such as high availability, tenant isolation, high
performance, and advanced load balancing.
Legacy hardware ADC appliances required app teams to open
tickets with the IT team to set up or change a load balancing
configuration, slowing down the app deployment process by days,
sometimes weeks.
Virtual ADC solutions were too complex for self-service.
Integration with the customers preferred automation tools would
take weeks of development and, despite the effort, would not
deliver the full range of desired features. Moreover, automation
would require a complex orchestration layer to map tenants and
applications dynamically to potentially dozens of virtual ADCs
required to meet performance requirements.

Technical Reasons to Choose Avi Networks

Avi Networks UI and CLI are implemented atop the native,
100% REST API, which gives programmatic access to every
object in the system.
Unlike legacy offerings that run outside the cloud, the
solution is integrated with OpenStack services such as
Nova, Neutron, Keystone, and Glance.
Implemented as a one-click drop-in replacement for
HAProxy in OpenStack, the product includes enterprisegrade load balancing features. Full integration with Puppet
streamlines and completely automates ADC deployment.
The software-controller-based architecture embraces
centralized policy definition. IT can define policies and SLAs
for each app team, and they in turn can leverage self-service
ADC provisioning for their apps via the Dashboard, without
creating a ticket.
The distributed data plane architecture delivers strong
tenant isolation. The Avi Service Engine (SE) is a micro-load
balancer which runs in the specific tenant context. To meet
SLA guarantees, SE instantiations are automatically created
to scale the configuration based on a tenants policies or as
new apps are added. In sharp contrast, legacy options (both
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physical and virtual) required multiple tenants to share ADCs.

Avi Networks offers high-performance SSL offload, including
the industrys first high-performance implementation of
Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Perfect Forward
Secrecy (PFS). App teams can manage SSL certificates
directly in the Dashboard in self-service fashion.

Benefits for the IT Team

With fully automated deployment and centralized policy definition
and enforcement, the Avi Networks solution has:
Eliminated IT tickets for setting up load balancing for each
newly added application or configuration change
Enabled IT to offer different ADC-deployment SLAs to the
various app development teams
Introduced elastic ADC scaling to gracefully cope with peak
demand, while eliminating the cost of over-provisioning
traditional ADCs
Avoided purchase of a separate app monitoring tool
Accelerated OpenStack adoption within app dev teams

Benefits for the App Teams

Self-service provisioning of application load balancing and
performance monitoring has:
Slashed ADC deployment times from days to minutes
Reduced troubleshooting times from hours to minutes
Increased app performance monitoring and SLA visibility

About Avi Networks

Avi Networks is the next-gen ADC company, enabling automation,
self-service and elastic scale. The Avi Networks solution combines
the benefits of enterprise-grade ADC features with the ease and
flexibility of elastic load balancing (ELB) for enterprises and cloud
service providers. With a unique analytics-driven and distributed
load-balancing architecture, the Avi Networks solution markedly
improves the end-user application experience for on-premises
and cloud-based applications, while reducing operational costs
and complexity by 90%. Please visit us at avinetworks.com or
follow us on Twitter @avinetworks.

2015 Avi Networks. All rights reserved. Avi Networks, the Avi Networks logo, Distributed Microservices, Inline Analytics, Cloud
Application Delivery Platform, and Hyperscale Distributed Resources Architecture are trademarks of Avi Networks in the United
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the right to change, modify, transfer, or otherwise revise this publication without notice.
70005-01 Oct 2015