With each blog post, I make a best attempt to create a catchy title that resonates with the product or company in hopes that it draws positive attention for everyone involved. I watched the video presentation multiple times before putting my thoughts together and more times than not, I come up with a title with no issues. For Avi Networks, I struggled for whatever reason but as I poked around their website to learn more about them, I stumbled across the Avi Vantage and voila here we are!
Representing Avi Networks at Tech Field Day during Cisco Live Europe was Ashish Shah (VP of Product Management).
Avi Networks was founded 6 years ago and is a modern load balancing and application services company based in Santa Clara, California including offices in Europe, Asia and Australia.
Mr. Shah provided the audience with a one hour presentation that included live demos, product architecture and use cases. Avi has developed a universal solution for load balancing for both on-prem or modern use cases which includes private or public clouds solutions. Their primary customers include financial companies, large technology companies, service providers and retailers. Cisco is a partner which includes in an investment into Avi Networks.
Customers have chosen Avi Networks because of its architecture, elasticity and automation capabilities. The Avi platform is a single product that is a software only solution that includes Software Load Balancers, Web Application Firewall and Elastic Service Mesh.
What distinguishes Avi from their competitors is their ability to separate the control plane (considered the brain of the system, can deployed in the cloud, on-prem or as a SaaS) and the data plane (stateless, elastic and managed by the controller), both are software components. Because both planes are software components they can run anywhere (Docker containers, ESXi, AWS, Azure, Cisco, and Kubernates to name a few) and all are centrally managed by the Avi Controller. Automation is broken into 2 parts (Infrastructure and the Avi REST API).
Licensing is based on the compute capacity of service engines and is completely agnostic, not tied to any specific hardware. Pricing is essentially based on the number of cores and provides a lot of flexibility for the customer. As Mr. Shah put it, Avi provides a single sku that includes all of its features, 24hr/7day support as a subscription model. Avi does also offer a cost optimization version of their license and more information about this can be found on their website.
Now onto the live demo. Upon logging in, we’re taken straight into the demo tenant that includes the application dashboard, some of which are running on-prem and in multiple public clouds. Each application includes a color coded health score which is a combination of throughput, latency and performance resources provided via API running on two load balances in an Active-Active fashion. Green is healthy, grey has been disabled by the user and red is reporting an issue with a respective error code. Please keep in mind, regardless of health score, each is tracked in the logs.
As we moved forward with the demo, Ashish guided us through the process step by step, which is a one-time, day zero configuration.
Additionally, advanced analytics and metrics are provided.
One of the biggest takeaways from this presentation is how well Mr. Shah interacted with fellow #TFDx delegates which included Ivan Pepelnjak, Orhan Ergun and Dominik Pickhardt.
Overall, I was extremely impressed by Avi Networks, their products and most importantly Mr. Shah’s ability to demo their product(s) flawlessly and answer each question without hesitation.
To learn more about Avi Networks, please click on the link below to watch the presentation which was recorded live while on-site for Cisco Live Europe 2019:
For more information about Cisco IoT, Tech Field Day and how to become a TFD – please click on the links below:
Please take a moment to subscribe to the YouTube channel which also includes watching the various videos that were posted throughout the day. Kudos to PrimeImage Media for recording the live sessions.
Thank You Stephen Foskett, Tom Hollingsworth, Ben Gage, Mel Zura and the entire Tech Field Day staff for including me on this unique, once in a lifetime opportunity.
Al Rasheed - A personal Blog about IT related subjects. 