The Avi Load Balancer SaaS complements the flagship Avi Load Balancer Platform, as the cloud-hosted option to deliver application services including distributed load balancing, web application firewall, global server load balancing (GSLB), network and application performance management across a multi-cloud environment. It helps ensure fast time-to-value, operational simplicity, and deployment flexibility in a highly secure manner.

Avi Load Balancer Architecture

The Avi Load Balancer architecture comprises two key components:

  • The Controller

    The Avi Load Balancer Controller is the control plane for the Avi Load Balancer solution. It provides a single point of management and operations, including configuration, visibility, analytics, and metrics. It uses big data analytics to analyze the data and present actionable insights to administrators on intuitive dashboards.

  • The Service Engines

    The Avi Load Balancer Service Engines (SEs) are the data-plane component. SEs collect real-time application analytics from traffic flows between end users and applications. The SEs are high-performance data-plane entities which perform the actual load balancing (LB) and web application firewall (WAF) functions. All configurations for a given SE are managed by the respective Controller Cluster.



For more information on the Avi Load Balancer Architecture, see the Load Balancing topic in the VMware Avi Load Balancer Configuration Guide.

Introduction to Avi Load Balancer SaaS

Prior to the introduction of Avi Load Balancer SaaS, Controllers and Service Engines would be deployed in the customer environment. With the advent of Avi Load Balancer SaaS, an additional operational model is offered, control plane as a service. With Avi Load Balancer SaaS, the Avi Load Balancer hosts and operates the control plane. Service Engines (the data plane) continue to reside in the customer environment (on-premises or in a public cloud). The following diagram depicts a Controller managed by Avi Load Balancer.



The salient features are listed below:

  • Avi Load Balancer-managed control plane, available as a service.

  • Instantaneous on-boarding: Avi Load Balancer Controller deployed in minutes.

  • The Avi Load Balancer provides continuous monitoring, configuration backups, software upgrades and patches, security alerts, and performance tune-ups

  • Proactive support

  • Multi-cloud solutions — data plane can be on-premises or in a public cloud.

Requirements for Connectivity to Avi Load Balancer SaaS

The following considerations are important while connecting your environment to Avi Load Balancer SaaS.

Case 1: No additional connectivity requirements from Avi Load Balancer SaaS to customer environment

In this scenario, Avi Load Balancer SaaS communicates with public API endpoints for respective Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud infrastructure where the customer workloads are provisioned. This works automatically, with no additional configuration or access policy requirement. The Avi Load Balancer SaaS supports the following cloud types in this mode:

  • Amazon Web Services

  • Microsoft Azure

  • OpenStack with public URLs (for example, Platform 9)

In addition, the Avi Load Balancer SaaS can work with no-orchestrator clouds. In this case, SE provisioning is done by the customer manually (or with the help of automation tools such as Ansible or Terraform). Avi Load Balancer SaaS does not require inbound access to the customer virtualization infrastructure. The cloud types supported in this mode are:

  • Linux Server Cloud

  • No-orchestrator clouds (for example, VMware read access)

Case 2: Avi Load Balancer SaaS requires connectivity to customer’s orchestration environment

In this scenario, the Avi Load Balancer SaaS communicates with the infrastructure typically residing in a private network. Once Avi Load Balancer SaaS is allowed to communicate with the virtualization infrastructure, it can communicate continuously with the virtualization orchestrator and provide fully automated provisioning. The Avi Load Balancer SaaS supports the following cloud types in this mode:

  • VMware write access

  • OpenStack hosted on-premises

  • VMware read and write access

Note:

  • In both Case 1 and 2 above, the Service Engines need to communicate with Avi Load Balancer SaaS. This might require allowing communication between the Avi Load Balancer Service Engines and the Controller IPs, over secure communication channels such as HTTPS and SSH.

  • Linux Server Cloud can function in either of the modes above.

Deploying Avi Load Balancer SaaS

This section lists the process for deploying the Avi Load Balancer Platform with the Avi Load Balancer SaaS operational model. The full deployment process is divided into three steps:

  • Registering for Avi Load Balancer SaaS

  • Connecting Avi Load Balancer SaaS to your cloud

  • Configuring application delivery features

Registering for Avi Load Balancer SaaS

  1. To sign up for Avi Load Balancer SaaS, navigate to https://info.avinetworks.com/saas and register.



  2. An Avi Load Balancer representative will contact you and provide a URL through which to connect. Log in to create an Avi Load Balancer account.

    Once the previous step completed, you will be provided with a login ID and the URL with which you can access Avi Load Balancer SaaS.

Connecting Your Cloud to Avi Load Balancer SaaS

In this section, Avi Load Balancer SaaS is configured to integrate with the network infrastructure where your applications are hosted (and where the Avi Load Balancer Service Engines will be provisioned).

Depending on the cloud type, please refer to the respective document mentioned below:

Cloud Type

Documentation

Microsoft Azure

See Installing Avi Load Balancer in Microsoft Azure topic in the VMware Avi Load BalancerInstallation Guide.

Amazon Web Service

See Installing Avi Load Balancer in Amazon Web Services topic in the VMware Avi Load BalancerInstallation Guide.

Linux server cloud

See Considerations for Deploying Avi Load Balancer in Linux Server Cloud topic in the VMware Avi Load BalancerInstallation Guide.

Configuring Application Delivery Features

Once the cloud is integrated with Avi Load Balancer SaaS, you can get started with creating your first virtual service. For more information, see Create a Virtual Service topic in the VMware Avi Load Balancer Configuration Guide.