Computer networking company Avi Networks Inc. is making its load balancing controller for multiple public clouds available starting today as software as a service.

Avi said it’s trying to overcome the limitations of appliance-based application delivery controllers that are not designed for public clouds, while also providing an easy way for network operators to provision their networks faster.

As the name suggests, load balancing relates to dividing up the amount of work performed by computers or servers on a network, so the work can be performed as efficiently as possible. To do so, most networking providers offer a controller, which was traditionally a piece of hardware or virtualized software attached to each appliance.

Avi SaaS is different in that the controller is software-based and delivered as a service instead. This is critical because most load balancers require a separate controller for each instance in each environment. But with Avi SaaS, users need only one controller to manage all of their services across every kind of environment, including public and private clouds and bare-metal servers with no software preinstalled.

The company claimed its service also has an edge over other SaaS-based load balancers such as Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Elastic Load Balancer, which can only operate within a single cloud.

The main advantage of Avi SaaS is that autoscaling and analytics can be performed much more easily, as traditional virtual appliances have to be managed individually. Avi SaaS also takes care of provisioning load balancers, can monitor application performance in real-time, and in many cases can resolve any issues by itself, the company said.

“Avi SaaS is ideal for cloud-oriented organizations, emerging brands, and highly distributed businesses,” Murali Basavaiah, Avi’s co-founder and vice president of engineering, said in a statement. “It provides all the flexibility and automation of the Avi Vantage Platform, and makes it available on tap, no matter where applications are deployed.”

Image: Avi Networks