Progress customers build some of their most mission-critical applications with the OpenEdge application development platform. Many have also taken the next step, moving these applications to the Progress Application Server (PAS) for OpenEdge to increase security and cloud readiness. This scalable, secure, and standards-based application server streamlines IT work requiring fewer system resources, which eases installation, configuration, and management.
To prevent outages and service interruptions, PAS supports deployment architectures with front-end proxying and load balancing to increase resilience, high availability, and security. The good news is this can all be achieved with Progress Kemp LoadMaster load balancing, simplifying scale-out and high availability scenarios.
LoadMaster helps optimize application deployments by providing intelligent traffic distribution, application-aware health-checking, failover, TLS certificate management, and security gateway functionality. All these functionalities of the LoadMaster enable PAS and the apps it powers to operate at their highest levels.
The ability to validate that PAS is not only operational but also available to serve client requests, ensuring that required application experience levels are maintained with client routing to avoid degraded instances. Moreover, properly distributing traffic across multiple back-end PAS servers ensures system resources are appropriately utilized and always deliver top-end performance.
Security
When security is a must — and it’s always a must — IT can apply the LoadMaster web application firewall (WAF) to protect PAS apps from security threats.
The LoadMaster’s native web application firewall also protects from common and challenging vulnerabilities, including SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other common cyberattack types. IT operations teams can build per application security profiles that perform source location-level filtering and leverage pre-integrated rulesets that cover common attack vectors.
With these pre-defined along with custom rules, attacks are prevented by blocking specific traffic patterns from reaching the applications and APIs — all without changing the application or infrastructure.
Availability
Application availability and application performance are equally critical in modern application deployments. While a slow application can still respond to user requests, a poor user experience may lead to abandonment. Unavailable applications can equally have a major impact on businesses if their applications and services are tied to the core value they deliver.
LoadMaster offers advanced health monitoring and failover capabilities to deliver always-on application delivery and resilience. LoadMaster delivers increased reliability by removing single points of failure both within a single data center or across multiple data centers or clouds.
For multi-site deployment instances, LoadMaster’s Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) can automate failover to an alternate site or cloud in the event of an outage
To summarize, LoadMaster combined with Progress Application Server for OpenEdge delivers an always-on application experience for today’s modernized applications.
Scalability
If there is one thing all IT professionals know it is that applications always grow over time, meaning they must scale properly to continue to perform and remain available. LoadMaster is built to extend PAS deployments to deliver unlimited scale. With LoadMaster, the PAS can span multiple sites or across clouds, maximizing scale to fit the needs of the business.
DNS — Not a Perfect Answer
Domain Name System (DNS) can be used to distribute across multiple resources, but DNS is not a perfect solution to distribute traffic intelligently and consistently. Perhaps you have a DNS name pointed at your servers. Should one of those servers fail, you will need to manually do an update to the DNS records, otherwise every other request is going to fail.
How LoadMaster Works to Support PAS
LoadMaster uses intelligent server health-checking, optimized performance, security, and automatic failover to support an always-on application experience for PAS. The diagram below shows a typical scenario.
LoadMaster uses intelligent server health-checking, optimized performance, security, and automatic failover to support an always-on application experience for PAS.
PAS for OpenEdge Plus LoadMaster — a Perfect Solution
Progress Application Server for OpenEdge scale-out architecture combined with LoadMaster’s flexible traffic handling and optimization enables organizations to push innovation further. For environments that span multiple data centers or clouds, LoadMaster GSLB enables efficient traffic distribution that can further increase performance and eliminate downtime in the event of a complete site outage.
LoadMaster Advantages
LoadMaster provides high performance and secure delivery of application workloads from a wide range of vendors, including:
- Microsoft
- Oracle
- IBM
- Dell
- Adobe
- Apache
The approach proven for so many mission-critical solutions can be just as effectively applied to Progress Application Server for OpenEdge.
- Deploy Anywhere — Hardware, Virtual and Cloud load balancing appliances
- Scalability — Hardware appliances with up to 90 Gbps throughput
- High Availability — Deploy multiple LoadMasters to eliminate single points of failure
- Simplified Configuration — Application templates built for PAS to publish with ease
- Automation — Automate load balancing configurations using the LoadMaster API, Java, or PowerShell
- Multi-Site — Provide multi-site/cloud resilience with LoadMaster GSLB
ISV, Provider and MSP Advantages
While enterprises benefit from LoadMaster, PAS ISVs, MSPs and other service providers gain at least as much. If the ISV is hosting the app and hosting that app inside of their own infrastructure or provides PAS directly to a customer, that is a primary opportunity. They can apply LoadMaster to their own infrastructure to provide value for PAS and use load balancing for other applications and upcoming projects they might have inside their infrastructures as well.
LoadMaster for Trusted Support
LoadMaster is the No. 1-rated load balancer on the market with hardware, virtual, and cloud load balancers optimized for an array of applications with templates and support. LoadMaster is easy to try with free, fully supported trials for all our load balancers. Try LoadMaster today.
