ADC
acronymnetworkingvendors & products
Stands for: application delivery controller
A device that load-balances and optimizes application traffic.
An application delivery controller sits in front of servers to distribute load, terminate TLS, and apply health checks and traffic policies. BIG-IP LTM is a canonical ADC; an AS3 'ADC-only' declaration configures just those functions.
An application delivery controller is the marketing successor to the load balancer, and the expansion is real rather than only nominal: TLS termination, health checking, content-based routing, compression, caching and a web application firewall in one device.
The consideration it creates is concentration. Putting all of that in one place is operationally convenient and makes it a single point of failure with a very large blast radius, since a device that terminates TLS holds the private keys for everything behind it and sees every request in clear text. That is a reasonable trade made deliberately and a serious exposure made by accident, and it is why the configuration of these devices deserves the same review as the applications behind them.
Also known as: adc