Free Scaled-Down App Load Balancer Now Available for DevOps
Kemp Technologies is now offering a free version of its Loadmaster application load balancer, a move the company is hoping developers and DevOps managers will use for distributed workloads that don't require a lot of capacity.
While the move is aimed at seeding its virtual appliance, the company is letting companies use it permanently for production workloads. The catch is that operators will have to reregister it with Kemp's licensing server every 30 days, it will only support 20 Mbps applications and it doesn't support the high availability features of its commercial version, said Kemp Product Manager Maurice McMullin.
Nevertheless, the company believes developers and DevOps managers will use the free virtual load balancing for testing, development and running non-critical applications that don't have large amounts of network traffic. "It's reasonably configured," McMullin said, noting that it includes the intrusion detection system and Web application firewall.
"People could use it in a preproduction environment and a dev-test environment and potentially even some production environments for non-critical low volume workloads," he added. One example might be a time sheet entry system where the application is distributed among locations but isn't used frequently and is not business critical.
Kemp isn't the first to offer a free load balancer. For example, HAProxy offers an open source version of its namesake load balancing software and operates a community site. But McMullin argues the Kemp offering is suited for mainstream VMware and Hyper-V workloads and can run in public clouds including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and VMware vCloud Air.
The company said its free offering includes complete testing and validation of applications in Kemp's global site load balancing (GSLB) and Edge Security Pack, which offers single sign-on. The free software also supports the Kemp Web Application Firewall Pac as well as its REST API and Windows PowerShell and Java API wrappers.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/12/2015 at 3:39 PM