Enterprise IT is undergoing a major shift, and traditional in-house datacenter-based application deployment models are fast transitioning to cloud-based models. These cloud-based models require flexible and consistent application delivery technologies as well as flexible licensing models that can enable easy transition to cloud while protecting existing investments.

Many of my customers started the journey of moving their technologies into the cloud long ago. Others have only recently begun to adopt a “cloud-first” approach or a more cautious “cloud-where -appropriate” strategy.

Regardless of where you are along the journey, your primary aim will be to ensure that the technologies you choose support your organization’s and your users’ needs. Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) with pooled licensing can assist you in moving to the cloud.

Pooled Licensing

Licenses were previously assigned via a web portal to physical ADCs based on hostIDs. This method tied up the license and the capacity to that single ADC appliance. While the license itself could be moved to another appliance manually if needed, the entire capacity associated with that license had to be moved.

Pooled licensing changes this and allows companies to pool their resources together and license all their ADC instances from one place. As a result, they save time and money by not having to worry about licensing individual instances. They also simplify cloud migration by allowing the same license pool to support multiple locations — on-prem or in the cloud.

In addition to offering the flexibility to run ADC instances anywhere, pooled licensing also enables the dynamic scaling of your Cloud environment as it allows new ADCs created by Citrix Autoscale or your DevOps team to check out licenses without the need for manual intervention.

Transitioning to Cloud

Pooled licensing enables you to cost effectively transition to the Cloud. Pooled licensing lets you unlock the throughput and instance licenses that you already own and transition services throughout the lifecycle of your existing appliances.

With pooled licensing, you can also expand capacity at your DR sites when needed and distribute your licenses across DCs on a global basis.

Imagine a customer with several SDX appliances who wants to move to the cloud. In a perpetual license model, each appliance may include 15Gbps throughput. Pooled licensing could reduce that to the appliance’s minimum throughput of 8Gbps, letting you use the remaining 7Gbps elsewhere.

As pooled licensing lets you host licenses centrally on ADM Service, licensing can be shared across on-premises and cloud platforms.

Our customer can now reuse that remaining 7Gbps per appliance and any unused instance licenses to create VPXs in Microsoft Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud Platform. Alternatively, the customer could opt to reuse their licenses on other SDXs elsewhere in the organization. Pooled licensing offers a lot of flexibility.

You can find a list of minimum requirements for each appliance here.

Deploy Citrix ADCs without Specialists

Efficient management of complex applications at scale poses many challenges. These include the need to build and deploy new features, ensure that applications can scale up or down as traffic increases or decreases, and ensure that applications remain available during periods of peak demand.

Many companies keep up with these challenges by developing in-house solutions, however they can become expensive and difficult to manage.

With Citrix ADM, you can overcome these challenges by implementing best practices and ready-to-use configurations from pre-packaged StyleBooks, regardless of whether you have access to specialists.

Application Delivery with Specialists

In a world of microservices and API driven technologies, application development and delivery lifecycle are shifting.

ADCs are at the center of this shift. They provide secure access to applications and services across multiple platforms for internal and external users, and they enable visibility into application and service performance via Citrix ADM.

IT departments are faced with a new set of challenges as a result of this shift in application architecture: How do they control traffic? Is it directed to the right services? How can APIs be used to automate configurations and deployments? What is the most effective method of monitoring the performance of applications and services across a large estate?

Citrix ADM can help with these challenges and give IT teams more control over their application architectures.

With Citrix ADM, IT professionals can automate their ADCs and apply declarative configurations that are stored in a composable format to avoid repeating common configuration patterns.

Monitoring and Analytics

An application’s performance is crucial to its success. Performance issues can be difficult to detect and can result in poor user experiences, lost business, and unhappy clients.

Citrix ADM offers a set of performance monitoring tools that allow you to keep track of your application’s performance. These include Web, HDX, Gateway, Security, SSL, and TCP insights.

Next Steps

We have seen how Citrix ADM and pooled licensing can assist with your journey to the cloud.

Citrix ADM service, Citrix’s hosted ADM, is available without charge under an Express license for two virtual servers, two configuration jobs, and two Stylebook config packs. The Express licenses also includes 24 hours or 500MB of analytics data to get started.

Get started with Citrix ADM service and contact your account manager to discuss your migration to pooled licensing.