"Blue Skies"

"Blue skies smilin' at me, Nothin' but blue skies do I see" - Irving Berlin

2015 has certainly been an incredible year of growth for Microsoft's Azure business.  With nearly 100,000 new subscribers per month, Microsoft is proving a formidable force in the public cloud market.  In 2016, along with AWS, Azure is expected to continue this momentum and extend its lead over would-be competitors.

As a longtime, go-to partner for load balancing Microsoft-centric environments and workloads, KEMP is not at all surprised by the strong uptick we've seen in our Azure business this year.  The hourly usage of our Virtual LoadMaster (VLM) for Azure (Azure VLM) offering has grown more than sixfold in 2015 (to roughly 100,000 hours/month) and in the process, has become one of the top partner solutions in the Azure Marketplace.

The popularity our Azure VLM product, however, is also a result of KEMP's competitive advantages in Microsoft's cloud platform:

• First-to-Azure - Azure VLM was the first commercially supported application delivery controller (ADC)/load balancer/reverse proxy available in Azure back in September 2013.  The solution was also the first to become Azure certified and available in the Marketplace during October of last year.  This lead has given us time to better understand production use cases and further optimize the solution for our Azure customers.
• Software-centric - in Azure, as in other public cloud environments, software-centricity is key.  For example, Azure VLM supports throughput as high as 10Gbps, SSL rates of 12K TPS and has no vCPU, memory or disk usage license limitations.  These types of capabilities come from years of proven success with, and refinement of, our VLM solutions for on-prem deployments.

But more importantly, our early success in Azure has highlighted the fundamental and fast growing need of Application Delivery solutions in public cloud deployments.  And the use cases we're seeing are not simply around traditional layer 7 load balancing or proxying, but rather critical functionality for deploying increasingly complex, multi-tiered apps and services in Azure.  These include features like:

• Content Switching - being able to aggregate multiple app front-ends into a single, unified experience for end-users.  An example of this would include providing a web experience composed of multiple discrete IaaS and PaaS applications and content repositories while ensuring that they are cohesively and securely delivered to end-users through a single domain name and/or IP address.
• SSL/TLS Offload (Termination)/Re-encrypt - an example of a functional area where Azure only provides some basic capabilities (offload/termination).  In addition, KEMP is able to provide a "one-stop shopping" experience for Azure architects and admins with requirements that touch multiple aspects of delivery networking (i.e. content switching AND health checks AND security) but who don't want to deal with all the prerequisites, scripting and integration of Azure load balancing components like the Internal Load Balancer (ILB), Application Gateway, and Traffic Manager.

In sum, we are happy to see our early investment in the Azure platform bearing fruit and invite you to experience the solution firsthand and free for 30 days:

Looking forward to more blue skies in 2016!