This blog post was co-authored by Hariharan Subramanian and Abhishek Gautam, Product Managers for App Delivery and Security, and was updated May 4, 2021.

Agility and elasticity are among the biggest drivers for enterprises to move to cloud. Cloud enables on-demand scaling out and scaling in and helps customers maximize resource utilization and increase resilience and IT productivity. Businesses love to get the resources they need on-demand while paying only for their actual usage. That enables them to respond faster to market demands.

Citrix ADC’s autoscale solution doesn’t just scale in or scale out Citrix ADC resources based on traffic patterns. It also integrates with AWS (Autoscale Group) and Azure (VM Scaleset), and GCP (MIG – Managed Instance Group) autoscale solutions to add or remove the scaled-in or scaled-out backend servers to the load-balancing server list.

When application traffic increases and the backend servers scale, Citrix ADC autoscales to ensure that applications use the Citrix ADC instances to meet demand. The beauty of Citrix ADC autoscaling? It happens in two gradual steps to maximize resource utilization:

  1. When application servers reach the AWS Autoscale Group/Azure VM Scaleset/GCP MIG threshold limits, new servers are spawned and automatically added to Citrix ADC for proper application delivery.
  2. When Citrix ADC’s resource utilization threshold limits — set in Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) — are reached, new Citrix ADC instances are spawned and added to the Citrix ADC cluster. This automatically increases the capacity of Citrix ADC

With this, Citrix ADC customers in AWS, Azure, and GCP get near unlimited Citrix ADC capacity on-demand, maximizing the resource utilization, and only have to pay for the actual usage, which makes it a cost-effective solution.

Citrix ADM: The Brains Behind the Scenes

Citrix ADM plays a critical role in Citrix ADC autoscaling. It’s the brains behind the scenes, defining:

  • The provisioning profile of the Citrix ADC, with details such as model, version, availability zones, and more that are required for a Citrix ADC instance to be brought-up.
  • The autoscale parameters that are used for scale-out and scale-in events.

Citrix ADM is a centralized network management, analytics, and orchestration solution. From a single platform, administrators can view, automate, and manage network services for scale-out application architectures. The diagram below shows the reference architecture and how the traffic flow works:

AWS customers can leverage automation scripts to simplify the creation of AWS infrastructure. Customers who are new to AWS or who are setting up a new AWS VPC can leverage these AWS CFTs to create the AWS infrastructure required for Citrix ADC autoscaling in just a few minutes.

Azure customers can leverage Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to simplify the deployment of Citrix ADCs in Azure. GCP customers can leverage Google Deployment Manager (GDM) templates to simplify the deployment of Citrix ADCs in GCP.

Learn More

Learn more about autoscaling Citrix ADC in AWS, autoscaling Citrix ADC in Azure, and Citrix ADM.