The Application Delivery Engineer

Things used to be easy.

No, wait.  Things never used to be easy.  In fact, they were horribly complex and frustrating to the point where engineers pull their hair out.  But now we usually expect around 99.99umpteen% uptime from our network equipment.

So frustration today often stems from the new tasks that enterprise IT engineers are expected to handle beyond the routers and switches.  Application delivery controllers, WAN Optimization controllers, and more latency sensitive applications such as VoIP and Teleconferencing simply mean that the IT teams are being tasked with problems that require them to think in new ways about what it means to be in IT.

If you’ve been to any networking convention or conference, you’ve probably heard “in IT you either develop applications or deliver applications” more times than you’ve seen the Brady Bunch episode in which Marcia gets hit in the face with a football.  That’d doesn’t make it any less true.

Ann Bednarz, writing for Network World, suggests that companies take research firm Gartner’s advice and look to hire “application delivery architects and engineers.”The idea is that there should be at least one person in the IT department whose full time job is worrying about application delivery and tuning on a WAN – someone who can converse with application developers and security teams and end users.

At NetQoS, we’re trying to help companies get the information they need to either designate and train an existing member of the IT staff for these new responsibilities, or at least know what to look for when hiring for an Application Delivery Engineer position.

For example, some things we’re doing right now include our NetAnalyst training based on real-world examples on resolving complex network application issues, and integrating our multiple products together in the NetQoS Performance Center.

But there are some more subtle ways in which we’re hoping to get this point across.  We argue that the most important metric for network performance management is application response time.  And while there’s many things that can affect application response time, the most basic is that your best possible application response time is limited by the latency of the connection (especially in financial applications,) multiplied by the number of connections that the application has to make.  Network engineers often focus on only one aspect of that formula, latency – while application developers only focus on the other aspect – the connections.  (That’s if they bother to think about the impact of the app on the network at all. And if they do, their test environment sorely lacks any similarity to the real world WAN.)

So the value of developing the role of the Application Delivery Engineer, someone who can coordinate the two halves of that Application Response Time equation, becomes clear.