The cloud has become a standard operating practice for companies as it brings the necessary levels of agility required for digital transformation, be it in private cloud environments or public cloud providers. It is essential to understand that the cloud operating model can only achieve the level of agility required to meet the demands of the business if every infrastructure component has been fully modernized. Cloud architects I've talked to have echoed a sentiment that goes, “You're only as agile as your least agile component,” which, in many cases, is the legacy hardware load balancer.
Load balancers are a core component of the infrastructure as they provide a range of critical services, such as SSL offload, caching, application monitoring, application security, and, obviously, local and global server load balancing. Legacy load balancers are tried and true infrastructure and have met the needs of the operations team for traditional applications previously. However, they do not meet the needs of the cloud operating model and modern container-based applications.