An Excellent Load Balancer, but Only for a Limited Number of Websites
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We need a server balancer and a WAF for a large number of sites in a network company. We use A10 Thunder ADC Networks to use both features. The objective was to implement more than 150 websites so they would be balanced on 4 servers. The balancing algorithm would be in a round-robin, and for the WAF, a custom configuration would be implemented, in which there would be a configuration for the front end sites and others for the back end. For the creation of HTTP templates, I used the graphical interface of A10 Thunder ADC, while my colleague used the CLI; I can say that in both ways, A10 Thunder ADC is easy to use and does not require advanced knowledge. Our problem occurs with the limit of sites allowed in the HTTP policies, where we could not exceed 64 sites, this caused us to leave the project aside and use an alternative. However, the positive aspects of A10 Thunder ADC are that as a balancer, it is very good and it distributed the load without problems, whereas the WAF was put in learning mode for 2 weeks and then switched to active mode and there were no major failures. If there were policies in the WAF files that were not detected in learning mode, they could easily be changed in the WAF templates.
Pros
- Load balancing
- Scripting AFLEX
- DDOS mitigation
Cons
- WAF
- ADC Templates
Likelihood to Recommend
A10 Thunder ADC works great for server balancing, and at this point, it was relatively easy to set up and worked great, and the round-robin load balancing was as expected.
SSL certificates were also configured for all sites, no problem.
As for Script programming, the use of Aflex was used, which was relatively easy to use, however, it had many limits and it was not possible to use it in all its functions (these functions focused on WAF). Now, regarding the WAF, this is where it fails the most, mainly due to the limit of HTTP and HTTPS policies that it had. We had to use an alternative due to the aforementioned limit. I also want to emphasize that the configuration of the WAF templates was quite simple to configure and it had many options to protect your site, from XSS options, SQL Injection, and more. Our only negative aspect was the limit of sites allowed in WAF. Another point of note is the use of a health monitor, so you can balance the servers from which they are turned on and which ones are down as this will allow you to always keep your services up. I totally recommend A10 Thunder ADC for companies that do not have a large number of sites to monitor (not to exceed 60). For security and stability in your organization, A10 Thunder ADC is very good and you do not have to envy your competition.
