Cisco capitalizes on Isovalent buy, unveils new load balancer

The customer deploys the Isovalent Load Balancer control plane via automation and configures the desired number of virtual load-balancer appliances, Graf said. “The control plane automatically deploys virtual load-balancing appliances via the virtualization or Kubernetes platform. The load-balancing layer is self-healing and supports auto-scaling, which means that I can replace unhealthy instances and scale out as needed. The load balancer supports powerful L3-L7 load balancing with enterprise capabilities,” he said.

Depending on the infrastructure the load balancer is deployed into, the operator will deploy the load balancer using familiar deployment methods. In a data center, this will be done using a standard virtualization automation installation such as Terraform or Ansible. In the public cloud, the load balancer is deployed as a public cloud service. In Kubernetes and OpenShift, the load balancer is deployed as a Kubernetes Deployment/Operator, Graf said. 

“In the future, the Isovalent Load Balancer will also be able to run on top of Cisco Nexus smart switches,” Graf said. “This means that the Isovalent Load Balancer can run in any environment, from data center, public cloud, to Kubernetes while providing a consistent load-balancing layer with a frictionless cloud-native developer experience.”

Cisco has announced a variety of smart switches over the past couple of months on the vendor’s 4.8T capacity Silicon One chip. But the N9300, where Isovalent would run, includes a built-in programmable data processing unit (DPU) from AMD to offload complex data processing work and free up the switches for AI and large workload processing.

For customers, the Isovalent Load Balancer provides consistent load balancing across infrastructure while being aligned with Kubernetes as the future for infrastructure. “A single load-balancing solution that can run in the data center, in public cloud, and modern Kubernetes environments. This removes operational complexity, lowers cost, while modernizing the load-balancing infrastructure in preparation for cloud native and AI,” Graf said.

In addition, it’s aligned with modern application development principles. “It removes ‘ticket ops’ style load-balancing configuration where application teams have to file tickets to get a load-balancing service. Instead, it allows application teams to leverage modern CI/CD deployment practices and accelerates deployment and time to market for new applications,” Graf said.