Pulse Secure launches new vADC Community Edition

Pulse Secure announced the launch of a new Community Edition of its powerful software-based virtual Application Delivery Controller (vADC) to help application developers create innovative application solutions with dramatically lower costs and time to market.

Pulse vADC Community Edition integrates easily with common DevOps tools for automated provisioning and orchestration, such as Kubernetes, Terraform, Puppet and Chef, making it easy to start building secure and scalable applications from day one.

“Pulse Secure vADC Community Edition is a free, full-featured application delivery controller that can be used in production scenarios which allow developers and enterprises to accelerate cloud application deployment by removing the hurdle of procurement and tooling. Pulse Secure is setting the benchmark for a try before you buy that competitors will have to follow,” said Mike Fratto, senior analyst at 451 Research.

Developers can use the Community Edition for commercial applications up to a limit of 10 Mbps, and up to four nodes can be clustered together for high availability, for a maximum aggregate bandwidth of 40 Mbps. The Community Edition is ideal for building and launching new applications and offers easy in-line upgrades for 24x7 support options and higher throughput to support global-scale applications.

In addition, customers can upgrade seamlessly to Pulse Services Director for flexible capacity-based licensing, and centralized enterprise management features, including powerful graphical analytics with actionable insights, to help understand application behavior and to diagnose application problems on the network.

“Our new Pulse Secure vADC Community Edition is a free-to-download, free-to-use, full-featured virtual application delivery controller (vADC) solution, which developers can use immediately to build smarter applications,” says Prakash Mana, vice president of product management for Pulse Secure. “Customers starting with the Community Edition can then upgrade to Pulse Services Director for enterprise management tools, flexible licensing, technical support and graphical analytics for on-demand applications.”

“Unlike other platforms that have a restriction on certain features within the ‘Free Edition’ - Pulse Secure vADC Community Edition offers all the capabilities of the full product with the only limitations being those of scale and support. Community Edition users still benefit from access to full documentation via the Pulse Community, and the option to migrate to a fully-supported platform or to scale up to higher throughput without the need for downtime,” Prakash adds.

Pulse Secure vADC Community Edition is available in three ways. For container deployments, the software can be installed from the Docker Hub without a need to register, giving frictionless access for container and microservices deployment.

Developers can use one-click access to the Community Edition via cloud marketplaces, such as Amazon AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Alternatively, downloads of the Community Edition are available from the Pulse Secure website, which offers the latest virtual appliance software images and access to full documentation.

“Our approach is to offer a low-friction option that is truly cloud-portable, allowing customers to migrate policies across multiple virtual and cloud platforms, so they are no longer tied to a specific cloud architecture,” says Prakash. “And unlike open source or other entry-level solutions, the Pulse vADC Community Edition includes full enterprise-grade capabilities such as an easy-to-use graphical user interface, global load balancing, and web application firewall as an integrated part of the solution, with transparent pricing models for upgrades and flexible licensing.”

Also highlighting the benefits for Pulse Secure partners, Prakash commented: “Our Community Edition makes it easier for our channel to offer new types of solutions to application developers that can combine with additional tools and orchestration platforms such as Terraform and Kubernetes to streamline proof of concept projects which can move seamlessly to full-scale production deployments.”