Avi Networks Software Load Balancer Reviews

Typically, Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is used for application delivery, some security use cases, and some Kubernetes service mesh. The primary use cases of the solution are application delivery and resiliency.

Avi Networks Software Load Balancer can improve the way some organizations function because the platform is agile. You don't have to forward invest in a lot of hardware or large bandwidth-based licensing. It can essentially scale horizontally in and out as the application demand is there, so it's very efficient to align with the needs of the application at any given time. Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is very easy to deploy and very flexible in the way that the feature sets can be deployed in a lot of different use cases, so it covers a lot of security and application use cases that give it a lot of flexibility and applicability to different environments.

What's most valuable in Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is its deployment capability, the ability to deploy in a dispersed service, with the service engines that can disperse and have a single control plane that can control the load balancing services across any available platform, wherever needed. The analytics of Avi Networks Software Load Balancer and flexibility of deployment are its most valuable features and the reasons why many people buy it.

One struggle with Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is its integration with other VMware products. Integration could be improved in the solution so that you have a more unified control plane with it and other data center security and networking products that VMware sells. There has been a bit of a lag on the roadmap of new features that have come out there recently, but better interoperability with the hyperscale environments such as the AWS, Azure, GCPs of the world, and simpler deployment and interoperability with those existing tools, are areas that are receiving attention and could use additional attention today. These are the areas for improvement in Avi Networks Software Load Balancer.

What I'd like to see in the next release of the product is further extension into service-managed capabilities, particularly for Kubernetes environments. That's going to be a big player.

Some pretty cutting-edge API security capabilities are being built into Avi Networks Software Load Balancer that are covering big tag vectors that people will continue to see when scaling out microservices applications. Those are also going to be big players moving forward and differentiators for the platform.

I've been selling Avi Networks Software Load Balancer for approximately two and a half years, and I've been selling up to the current 22 version, though I'm not sure what the latest release is.

Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is a stable solution. Its stability is not only based on its well-written code, but also on the disaggregated way it's deployed. If there's a particular problem with a service engine, for example, the time it takes to recover and keep applications up is extremely fast. It has a pretty healthy analytics platform that goes with it, so it's always measuring application health and its own health, so the remediation of issues as they come, reduces the blast zone, and is fast to recover so you're not seeing large portions of downtime.

Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is extremely scalable. It's essentially because of the architecture of the application, of the control plane, and data plane segregation between the two, so it's essentially infinitely scalable, though there are obviously engineering requirements.

I would rate technical support for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer four out of five. It's a very "direct services" organization that doesn't delineate between the engineering and development and the solutions and services teams. It's all one big team that doesn't have a lot of layers or pillars within so support isn't slowed down. Technical support is very efficient and it's a very close-knit team.

The initial setup for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is very straightforward. I have customers with certain environments, even complex environments, where the solution can be deployed within two hours, from start to finish.

I've seen a return on investment from Avi Networks Software Load Balancer. With the business evaluations my company did, you're not forward investing in massive amounts of hardware or high bandwidth licensing. The return on investment is extremely quick because of the alignment to your licensing and what applications you have and require at any point in time. The challenge with engineering around a lot of platforms these days is that you have to make a guess and deploy and hope that you're consuming the amount of bandwidth and hardware that you've deployed, and sometimes, it's extremely underutilized and over-engineered, and so you're spending money on things that you're not using.

The licensing costs for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer are really variable. The product can be sold from a bandwidth utilization perspective. It can be sold from a per CPU perspective, depending on if you're looking at on-premises or hyperscale environments. Licensing costs vary quite a bit if you're familiar with the AWS Calculator, where you can see that it can widely vary per licensing model.

On a scale of one to five, with one being not very good value for the money and five being great, I would rate the pricing for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer a five because its pricing is extremely competitive.

Not all features are included with the license, for example, there's single licensing.

I didn't evaluate other solutions as I'm in sales.

I'm in sales and I sell Avi Networks Software Load Balancer to enterprise customers in the North America area. I have enough familiarity with the product.

I have customers that have deployed Avi Networks Software Load Balancer in all of the various models: on-premises, hybrid, and all the various permutations of that.

In terms of user roles for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer, the typical user roles are networking and security teams, though some customers are more progressive and rely on development organizations to manage balancing capability. More of the legacy environments would have a networking security team that would operate the platform as you get into more of the hyperscale and the dev-ops organizations that are a little bit more progressive. The development teams make that part of the CICD pipeline and operate the platform in an agile way.

As for how much staff is required for the deployment and maintenance of Avi Networks Software Load Balancer, it varies. There's no prescribed number of operators per workload, and the intent is because it was developed as a cloud-first type of platform, it's very automated in low touch as far as operational requirements and overhead, versus some of the competition I've seen out there.
Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is on the very efficient side of low operator requirements for deployment versus what you may have typically seen, for example, a hundred applications per administrator ratio. It just depends on how the organization operates and how the operations teams are organized and divided.

My company has a lot of customers that are operating F5 and NetScaler, and many of the other competitor platforms, and I don't see customers making large new investments in more staff to bring in Avi Networks Software Load Balancer as part of the solution mix, so it's a solution customers can bring in and not overburden existing teams with.

The advice I would give others looking into implementing the solution is
to not look at Avi Networks Software Load Balancer as a brand new load balancer that is complex and hard to deploy, but look at it more as a cloud-first architecture that provides both automation to ease operations, and analytics that provides real-time feedback on platform health and how it's able to auto remediate any problems that it might have. It's not a new, scary skill set that some operations team is now burdened with, rather, it's more of a very efficient tool that makes jobs easier.

I'd give Avi Networks Software Load Balancer a rating of eight out of ten. I don't know if there's any platform out there that can get a ten, but this solution is on the very high end.

The use case is very isolated right now. It's got very specific use cases. It's not a product that we deploy across due to our support infrastructure.

Whether or not it improves our environment just now is 50/50. I can't say that it does. And I can't say that it harms it either as they're very specific use cases. Our operational support infrastructure does not have the knowledge base to support it yet. It's still a work in progress.

The integration into the host environment is the most valuable aspect right now.

The solution is stable.

It's fairly easy to get it up and running. 

It doesn't match the development structure or user community of our existing product. It pales in comparison to that.

It's not fully grown up. Other people might think that, however, our comparison against a product line that we use shows it's not as grown up as the existing product line.

We'd like it to be more open to third-party integration.

Their salespeople can be a bit aggressive. They're trying to get into an area that is dominated by large vendors elsewhere. So they tend to be a little bit more aggressive than some people would like.

We haven't used it too much. We are running a comparison analysis right now. 

The stability has been good. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

It's scalable to a point, however, not in comparison to our hardware platforms. It's not as scalable as that. It is a software product and due to how our infrastructure is, it's very hard to scale. Auto scale is what we would want based on our management infrastructure.

Most of the people who use it regularly are application developers. 

I'm not sure if we will increase usage. We're still analyzing it and have to do that at a larger scale first.

I've dealt with support in the past. It's limited only as it's not a full-scale production deployment. They're very individualized use cases.

Once you get it set up, it's straightforward. It takes longer than a typical hardware product as it is a software product, and due to the fact that there are different teams that we have to work with to get it built out that we don't really manage over. The setup is a little bit longer than a typical scenario with our focus product.

A very small number of people handle any maintenance tasks as it's not fully implemented yet.

Everything primarily s done in-house. For these types of product lines, we do the implementations ourselves.

We haven't yet seen an ROI as we have very specific use cases right now. 

The pricing is good. It's pretty inexpensive. 

The pricing is moderate. I'd rate it a three out of five in terms of affordability.

We looked at other options. We have our main product line. We evaluated this, and other vendors as well. We evaluated NGINX, for example, and everything in all scenarios. My main concern is this solution is not as mature as other options. 

I'm not sure which version number we are on. It's one of the latest, I assume. We don't run the latest. We usually are either one or two versions behind.

It is something we are exploring. We do have use cases and it will compete against our existing product line. That would have to go in the second half of this year. Right now, it's more of a comparison of how we use it right now. We don't use it really in production. We are going to definitely explore it and do our comparison and more in-depth analysis of the product and compare it against our existing product line.

I'd advise potential users to do a very in-depth analysis of the products in comparison. And don't just look at the cover of it - really look into the detailed backend support infrastructure and if it can be implemented the way you need it to be.

I'd rate the solution five out of ten. It's not a fully mature product.