What is application delivery management?

Application delivery management is a comprehensive collection of functions and capabilities that enable organizations to deliver services to customers anywhere. It involves tracking a number of runtime metrics, security responses, and access logs to ensure that applications are running their best. 

Accordingly, application delivery management aims to maximize performance, reliability (promoting high availability), and security while providing ample scalability to meet demand. There's also some crossover between application delivery management and load balancer management. The latter ensures that your infrastructure (public key infrastructure included) is scalable, readily configurable, and intelligently automated. 

Application delivery management isn't a new phenomenon. However, the ways in which teams and organizations as a whole tackle it have evolved over decades. While fragmented, disparate tools once comprised an app delivery strategy, centralization has become increasingly important.

How does application delivery management work?

Application delivery management consists of two pieces: the data plane and the control plane. The data plane handles the flow of packets and datagrams across the network, ensuring they reach their final destination. The control plane is where the management aspect comes in — governing how data travels across the network via routing rules and other administrative controls. Ideally, these layers work together to deliver smooth and efficient user experiences.

The control plane does some heavy lifting here by enabling the following:

• Configuration management – Teams can define their backends, frontends, listeners, routing rules, timeouts, and health checking processes across all applications, including those in Kubernetes environments. Management means pushing these updated configurations out quickly and dynamically while minimally disrupting production traffic. 

• Cluster management – Teams can add, remove, or reconfigure individual load balancers or clusters of load balancers to meet demand. They can also implement strict access control through mechanisms such as RBAC, and via the principles of least privilege and zero trust. 

• Load balancing as a service (LBaaS) – Adjacent to cluster management, LBaaS empowers App teams to take control of application delivery by provisioning the infrastructure they need. Otherwise, they'd rely on central Ops teams and other administrators to closely deploy load balancing clusters manually by request.  

• Observability – Teams can use GUI-based dashboards and other visualizations to know what clients are doing, view changing traffic conditions, and keep an automated catalog of active services. This last item is crucial within dynamic and ephemeral Kubernetes environments, while providing unified visibility in multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud deployments

• Security implementation – Teams can apply per-app or global security policies across environments — including those dictating WAF coverage, DDoS protection, rate limiting, bot management controls, response policies, and more. These measures protect your applications and keep data safe from bad actors.  

• Audit logging – Teams can track client access patterns and behaviors, assess error rates, and retrospectively troubleshoot based on runtime data. This is also a key requirement to uphold regulatory compliance or service-level agreements (SLAs) in many instances.

This all happens at the network layer (Layer 3) of the OSI model. Meanwhile, the data plane does its part by receiving and analyzing data packets, forwarding data onward to its destination, detecting and correcting transmission errors, and enabling flow control on busy networks. It accomplishes this by providing a combination of features and capabilities:

• Load balancing – App delivery features such as broad internet protocol support, advanced routing decisions, session stickiness, traffic shaping, and global server load balancing (GSLB) support a wide range of applications while helping global users access them. 

• Security – Protective features such as a web application firewall (WAF), DDoS protection and rate limiting, bot management, client fingerprinting, CAPTCHA challenges, and HTTP validation help prevent abuse. 

• High availability – Reliability features such as automated health checks, route health injection, traffic overload protection, VRRP, and others ensure that services remain online and reachable around the clock. 

• Application acceleration – Performance boosting features such as HTTP caching, HTTP compression, connection pooling, multithreading, and optimized SSL/TLS can help data traverse the network faster while reducing network bandwidth use. 

• Administration – Interactivity through assorted load balancing APIs help teams manage the data plane programmatically, primarily through configuration updates and load balancing data collection (making it easier to manage everything via control plane).

Application delivery management via ADN and CDN

Application delivery networks (ADNs) expand access to critical services, regardless of where they live. It accomplishes this through a network of geographically-distributed infrastructure locations to serve dynamic content with minimal latency to nearby users. This can include the entire application stack. In many cases, each user will see a different version of the application that's tailored to their preferences and access privileges.

Conversely, content delivery networks (CDNs) achieve this by delivering static content an application (such as a website) relies on, including client-side scripts, images, videos, and other files. Web servers can deliver these cacheable assets quite quickly. When a web server in one region fails or encounters other issues, the CDN can automatically route traffic to another healthy server that's situated as closely as possible. Similar to ADNs, CDNs can also distribute client requests between multiple servers to help manage traffic spikes. 

Both ADNs and CDNs have indispensable roles within a greater application delivery management strategy. They're common infrastructure components across a range of industries, and help increase the speed and resilience of your applications.

What are the benefits of application delivery management?

Application delivery management has many advantages, including the following: 

• Teams can ensure better performance, security, and high availability for their services. 

• Teams can respond more quickly (or proactively) to fluctuating demand.

• Because teams can more accurately assess the number of load balancers they need, it's easier to optimize infrastructure costs. 

• Teams can apply a vast array of access, routing, and security policies more easily, with the flexibility to assign these everywhere or per individual service. 

• Teams often gain a centralized command center from which they can make infrastructure changes, as opposed to working purely programmatically. This makes the process easier for users with less technical knowledge while giving everyone a shared snapshot of activity. 

• Teams can more easily manage key dependencies such as configuration files, PEM files, SSL/TLS certificates, access control, and more from one place.

• Teams can more easily implement automations and other elements of DevOps practices — supporting CI/CD workflows, GitOps, and infrastructure as code (IaC).

Does HAProxy support application delivery management?

Yes! With HAProxy One application delivery platform, your teams get a unified platform that handles both the performance demands of the data plane and the operational control of the control plane.

Teams running HAProxy One can manage load balancing at scale, apply security policies globally or per service, automate infrastructure changes, and maintain full visibility across multi-cloud and hybrid deployments. All of this from a single platform, without stitching together disparate tools.

Want to see how it works for your infrastructure? Request a HAProxy One demo and explore the platform firsthand.