The Internet has become a ubiquitous part of our lives over the past few decades. The increasing breadth of online services has driven the development of increasingly sophisticated web applications. The evolution of these web applications has driven an evolution in the data center edge — the hardware and software stack that connects these web applications to the Internet, and the location at which a customer begins interacting with an organisation’s business services. The edge has evolved from simple hardware load balancers to a full stack of hardware and software proxies that comprise API Gateways, content delivery networks, and load balancers.
