Application delivery was born over 25 years ago. From the first load balancer used to scale web applications to web acceleration that addressed performance problems to API and AI gateways, application delivery has always focused on how best to deliver, scale, and secure applications.
The rise of cloud computing led to a breakout of security services, as cloud providers and ADCaaS emerged to provide security services that focused on serving public cloud-hosted applications.
Subsequently, we saw the development of “Top 10” lists for security concerns, led by OWASP, that eventually became the standard the industry is using today for securing applications, APIs, and now LLMs.
But there has never been a corresponding list for the application delivery services that 93% of organizations deploy and rely on to ensure the scale, performance, and availability of applications and APIs.
Until now.
It seems fitting that the company that introduced the first load balancer, established the ADC (Application Delivery Controller), and delivers more than a significant portion of the Internet, should sit down and enumerate the Top 10 Application Delivery challenges faced by organizations across the globe. After all, we have more than two decades of experience delivering and securing applications and APIs in some of the most demanding environments on the Internet.
From DNS to delivery policies, from traffic control to traffic steering, from observability to programmability, F5 not only sees the top delivery challenges organizations face—but knows how to solve them.
So, we gathered a group of technical experts—distinguished engineers, architects, and field facing engineers—and hammered out the top list of challenges related to application delivery. While we all agree there are many more challenges out there, we also all agreed that these were the Top 10 that threaten the scale, performance, and availability of all applications and APIs.
| # | F5 Top 10 Application Delivery Challenges | WorldTech IT Insights & Comments |
|---|---|---|
| ADC01 | Weak DNS Practices | |
| ADC02 | Lack of Fault Tolerance and Resilience | |
| ADC03 | Incomplete Observability | |
| ADC04 | Insufficient Traffic Controls | |
| ADC05 | Unoptimized Traffic Steering | |
| ADC06 | Inability to Handle Latency | |
| ADC07 | Incompatible Delivery Policies | |
| ADC08 | Lack of Security and Regulatory Compliance | |
| ADC09 | Bespoke Application Requirements | |
| ADC10 | Poor Resource Utilization |
These challenges apply to single environment estates as well as hybrid and multicloud estates. While hybrid and multicloud environments often exacerbate a challenge and even make solutions more complex to implement, the challenges are architectural and operational challenges that are often the source of performance, scale, and availability troubles.
It is our hope that articulating the Application Delivery Top 10 will help organizations recognize and address them before they become a problem. This list also provides a foundation for understanding the application delivery needs for specific types of applications—such as GenAI—and the solutions that address them.
Learn more about the Top 10
ADC02 Lack of Fault Tolerance and Resiliance ›
ADC03 Incomplete Observability ›
ADC04 Insufficient Traffic Controls ›
ADC05 Unoptimized Traffic Steering ›
ADC06 Inability to Handle Latency ›
ADC07 Incompatible Delivery Policies ›
ADC08 Lack of Security and Regulatory Compliance ›
