A New Generation of ADCs for the AI Era

The evolution of the ADC represents a significant leap forward in application delivery and security through three distinct eras. When the first generation of ADCs, ADC 1.0, emerged during the dotcom boom-they were built for on-prem data center infrastructures to support monolithic and three-tiered applications with a security component that focused on WAF and DDoS protection. These were primarily hardware and virtual appliances used for load balancing, content caching, and web application security-F5 grew to lead this market, helping large enterprises scale their digital services for the web era.

The advent of cloud computing in the 2010s required ADCs to match the scale of the cloud with greater agility, scalability, and cost effectiveness. This gave rise to ADC as a Service, which expanded the capabilities of the ADC to address customer challenges in cloud transformations. This era of ADC made physical hardware in on-premises data centers less appealing as the distributed nature of cloud required visibility, scale, and consistency. Applications made a similar shift, with the rise of microservices and containerization providing flexibility and easier maintenance of cloud-based apps. The emergence of new threats, particularly against an expanding number of APIs, created the need for additional security capabilities such as API security, bot defense, and DDoS mitigation.

As the cloud era rolled along, it was generally assumed that every app would be in the cloud. Many believed hybrid was temporary. They believed the cloud would be faster, cheaper, and more secure, and that it would be less of a burden on IT teams who required greater business agility.

But, of course, those predictions have proved wrong on multiple levels.

Today's apps are built on multiple architectures and live in many environments, including multiple clouds, SaaS, edge locations, and corporate data centers. As AI promises to increase the complexity of the present hybrid, multicloud infrastructures, we must once again reimagine our collective vision to meet the needs of an ever-changing digital landscape.