Snapt @ vRetreat May 2020

Last week I received an invitation to the latest in the vRetreat series of events. These events bring together IT vendors and a selected group of tech bloggers- usually in venues like football clubs and racetracks, but in the current circumstances we were forced online. The first of the two briefings at the May 2020 event came from Snapt.

Established in 2012, Snapt is built on a product range they refer to as “Load Balancing Plus” – taking in Load Balancing, Web Acceleration and Firewall. They have a recent flagship release named “Nova” which enables the deployment and scaling of these load balancers across multiple environments.

It’s an interesting approach for anyone working in a multi-cloud environment, for example with workloads in vSphere, AWS, and Azure, who wants a consistent method of deploying, securing, and maintaining their load balancers in all of these clouds from one SaaS platform.

Snapt achieve this by separating their control and data planes – The SaaS control plane is managed by a clean web-based dashboard or API calls, and from there the nodes are deployed to the target infrastructures as VMs, containers, or cloud devices depending on the platform.

This separation of the nodes from the control adds potential for scaling, helped by their stateless nature. Logs are streamed directly out of the node and the parameters are pulled down from the control plane. Nodes also expose interfaces to allow direct monitoring from third-party applications as well as that provided by the Nova dashboard.

Down on the node, the load balancing features are supported by a wide set of security tools. Traditional blacklists and whitelists are supported by more advanced features such as geofencing and anomaly detection. Activity here is reported back up to the dashboard to give admins a clear, global, view of load and threats across their environments.

Whilst there are plenty of other load balancing solutions on the marketplace, based on this briefing I’d say that Snapt are well worth a look and particularly if the requirement is for a multi-cloud type environment.

There is a Community Edition of Nova available which allows up to 5 nodes free of charge- check out nova.snapt.net/pricing for details.

Please read my standard Declaration/Disclaimer and before rushing out to buy anything bear in mind that this article is based on a discussion at a analyst session rather than a POC or production installation. I wasn’t paid to write this article or offered any payment, aside from being entered in a  prize draw of delegates to win a chair (I was not a winner).