Riverbed Technology officials are looking to make it easier for businesses to fit the company’s application performance tools into their environments.
Riverbed is offering IT professionals a set of developer tools and new product capabilities that will enable them to customize their infrastructures to meet their particular business demands and to give end users the best experience possible. The new developer tools—which includes a Python software development kit (SDK) and a number of REST-based APIs, all under the Flyscript moniker—will be supported by Splash, Riverbed’s online community.
The new offerings are designed to give businesses and IT staffs the tools they need to more easily bring Riverbed’s application acceleration and management capabilities into their networking infrastructure, and integrate their own products with Riverbed offerings, Christopher White, senior director of Riverbed Technology Council, told eWEEK. The tools and product enhancements, announced March 11, are in response to growing demand from customers for tools to give them a more programmable infrastructure, White said.
“We’ve had several customers say they need these APIs,” he said. “It’s opening the door to our products.”
The new Flyscript developer tools not only enable integration and automation within Riverbed’s platform, but also with third-party tools and customers’ own proprietary software, according to Riverbed officials. The tools touch on everything from scripting and automation to integration and visibility, and dovetail with efforts around software-defined networks (SDNs) and software-defined data centers (SDDCs), White said.
The new Flyscript developer tools follow what Riverbed has done with its Stingray Traffic Manager, which enables users to customize traffic management policies for their own applications, he said. The new tools extends those customization and integration capabilities.
“We’re going to really be pushing on the customization front,” White said.
Included in the Flyscript package of tools are the REST APIs for such Riverbed products as Cascade Shark (for packet capture and analysis), Cascade Profiler (the network analysis, monitoring and reporting console in dashboards) and Stingray. The APIs give developers a way to configure the Riverbed products as needed. In addition, the Python SDK offers application programmers as well as the more casual coders an easy way to program for the Riverbed products.
“It just makes this a lot easier,” White said of the inclusion of the Python SDK.
He said that Riverbed is looking to differentiate its API efforts from those from the likes of Cisco Systems and F5 Networks by offering a more holistic view of the network as a programmable system.
Riverbed officials also are encouraging developers to join the Splash community, where they can find the information they need to take advantage of the Flyscript tools and create more programmable infrastructures. Through the Splash community, developers will be able to communicate with peers and share information and other resources. They also will be able to interact with developers and the support team from Riverbed.