Hey everyone! 👋 We're in the middle of a big infrastructure shift, moving more workloads to Azure but keeping some critical apps on-prem for the foreseeable future. Our current on-prem Radware Alteon hardware ADCs are rock solid, but we're being pushed to evaluate their cloud service (Radware Cloud WAF & ADC) for the hybrid model.
I've been running some real-world tests and the trade-offs are becoming clear. Here's my take so far:
**On-Prem ADC (Alteon Hardware)**
* **Control:** Full, granular control over every config line and traffic path. Our team knows it inside out.
* **Performance:** Predictable, low-latency for internal east-west traffic. Handles our big batch processing jobs without breaking a sweat.
* **Cost:** High upfront CAPEX, but predictable licensing. Operational overhead is on us (patching, HA configs).
* **Integration:** Clunky for our cloud-native apps. API exists but feels bolted on compared to cloud-native tools.
**Radware Cloud Service**
* **Agility:** Spin up protection for a new app in minutes. This is a huge win for dev teams wanting quick staging envs.
* **Management:** Single pane for both on-prem and cloud traffic flows is tempting. Reduces context switching.
* **Cost Model:** OPEX, scales with usage. But I'm doing an ROI analysis and the long-term cost for high, steady traffic is a question mark.
* **The "Gotcha":** Latency. For our hybrid apps where the front-end is in Azure but the database is on-prem, the extra hop for the cloud ADC to talk back on-prem adds milliseconds that our finance app team is already complaining about.
My main question for the community: **Has anyone successfully run a *true* hybrid setup with split traffic or specific services?** I'm thinking of keeping the data-sensitive, high-throughput processing on the on-prem ADC and routing user-facing, scalable web apps through the cloud service. Is the management overhead of two policies/config worlds a nightmare, or is the unified console good enough to make it work?
Keep automating!
Keep automating!