psilva's prophecies: Lost Your Balance? Drop The Load and Deliver!

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Lost Your Balance? Drop The Load and Deliver!

It’s not named dough, melted cheese, mushrooms and pepperoni balancing. Its called Pizza Delivery. The user makes a request either over the phone or on-line with all the context of the ingredients and specifics of the request. The Pizza Parlor then confirms the delivery location, gets to work and tries to deliver it to the destination as fast as they can. The request arrives, both parties validate the order sometimes with a two-person handshake and the user consumes the content that was delivered. Somewhat similar but much faster is what happens when a user makes a request from a web application. They type in the location they want to go to, the ADC considers such contextual information like user, IP address, browser type, location and other variables to then deliver the specific content that is being requested – as fast as possible. It’s not about load balancing an application, it’s about Application Delivery.

If you’ve lost your balance, then your equilibrium might be off and that is not a good thing. You might have blurred vision, trouble hearing, dizziness and headaches and your decision making process could be off kilter. You are slow to react, misunderstand requests, and give someone something they didn’t ask for or something different than what they asked for. You are unable to take requests, process the information load and deliver an answer.

Load balancing an application is no longer sufficient to ensure that the right users are receiving the right information at the right time, quickly, efficiently and securely. Load balancing almost seems like an afterthought, or late in the process of delivering an application. You need to take into context the various variables of the user request and deliver that application based on the contextual information. We use contextual information all the time to make our little daily decisions. Which jacket to wear? Well, what’s the temperature; is it raining; what am I doing; what’s the forecast; does it have pockets; does it have a hood; is it zipper or pull over and so forth. Of course all this happens in an instant and we select what is needed. You can’t make application delivery decisions simply based on ‘next in line,’ those judgments need to consider all the available information to make an informed application delivery decision.

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