As applications have evolved from stand-alone applications, to client-server applications, to distributed applications and now to cloud-based elastic applications, application performance management has evolved to follow suit. The interaction between the technology stack, servers, containers, and the underlying infrastructure can have a significant effect on overall performance.

Many applications are migrating to a more modern, scalable, easier to provision and manage architectures with containers.
Together with the simplification of application management and deployment , a new complexity, by creating an entirely new infrastructure ecosystem has been created. Container orchestration centralizes the management of the lifecycle of the container infrastructure and enables automation of multiple tasks.

With the rapid growth of Web applications and increased traffic, the need for reliable connectivity is critical. SD-WAN uses a centralized control function to securely and intelligently direct traffic across the WAN, leveraging any combination of transport services to create a virtualized network overly. Multiple Internet connections combined with multi-path technology can improve performance and better control costs. Being able to consistently control this drives the business benefit.

Network monitoring with automation allows for a proactive environment ready to react based upon a series of criteria being met. Extending network automation to operational tasks can not only provide automated notification and reporting but also further integration with deployment tools for provisioning. The adoption of various cloud providers, network virtualization, and other virtual tools increases the need to monitor siloed tools.

Software Defined Networks is an architecture that is dynamic, manageable, cost-effective, and adaptable, making it ideal for the high-bandwidth, dynamic nature of today’s applications. SDN decouples network control and forwarding functions. This enables network control to become directly programmable. Network managers can configure, manage, secure, and optimize network resources very quickly via dynamic, automated central controller. Controllers maintain a global view of the network, which appears to applications and policy engines as a single, logical switch.