Understandably we get quite a few requests for a product road map. We’ve had a chat about this internally and thought that it would be nice to have a permanent post on the blog that we change on the fly as customer requirements change.
Putting this on the blog enables our customers to express their arguments for and against new features etc. This entry should also give you a better idea of our priorities and how we develop the product:

Lets start with our current priority list, this is an overview of the things we feel are most important in a load balancer appliance in priority order:

1. Security – Fast, rapid and proactive improvements
2. High-Availability – Constant improvements to underlying systems – future enhancements to intelligence, logging and alerting.
3. Maintenance – Constant focus on close to zero downtime for maintenance and security updates i.e. helping the customer carry out software updates on servers in the cluster.
4. Performance – Constant re-assessment of the best default configurations for performance, and renewed focus on special application performance requirements (i.e. lots of small packets or lots of large ones)
5. Support – How can we make the product easier to support and how can we improve the support service
6. Usability – Improvements to look and feel + intelligence and ease of use
7. New Platforms – Integrate new platforms as and when they become customer priorities i.e. azure
8. New features – Assess against our priorities and implement if, and only if they match our stated priorities.
9. New products – Constantly looking for new applications to help customers with their application infrastructure requirements.

So what features are actually in the pipeline at the moment?

Several performance enhancements for specific types of traffic (or if we are honest here just to make sure we get the best results on crazy non-real world load tests that magazine reviews do…)
Overhaul of system overview, graphing (coming very soon) and detailed numerical stats (slightly later)
Layer 7 external health checks
Layer 7 email alerts
Layer 7 complex manual configurations, acls etc that maintain system overview compatibility.
Enhancements to layer 4 maintainability and matching behaviour to be similar to layer 7 (especially the fallback server)
Hardware compatibility/performance updates for new hardware models i.e. Dell R220
Moving the full v7.x application to the Amazon EC2 cloud platform
New Kernel improvements for multiple hyper-visor platforms VMWare, XEN, Hyper-V, KVM & EC2
Improvements to the Layer 7 HAproxy stateful restart and replication model
Re-write of the security model for pairing master and slave units
Big performance and functionality improvements to the windows feedback agent

And some features on the soon to be scheduled wish list:

Full re-write of the High-Availability subsystem (heartbeat) focusing on stability and scalability and intelligence for multiple nodes.
Plug-in architecture and wizard for controlling the auto-scaling of backend servers in clusters.
Enhancements and intelligence into real server health monitoring
Port of the full product to Microsoft Azure cloud platform
More wizards for setting up specific applications
Easy to use Denial of Service rules
Simple rules to direct users to different clusters when the primary one is busy i.e. busy e-commerce site flood control
Web user interface support for multiple backend clusters attached to front ends with rules i.e. server pools
Multiple pools for health checks as above
Easy and secure remote access to customer load balancers from Loadbalancer.org support staff

Things we are not doing:

Mobile phone/ipad apps
GSLB
SNORT
Graphical firewall
Firewall load balancing
Link balancing
TMG replacements

Obviously this blog post needs a lot of work….
and will change rapidly…
please comment, thanks.

You Can Learn More About the LoadBalancer.org’s Product Line By Going to www.LoadBalancerSolutions.com/LoadBalancer-org

The original article/video can be found at Loadbalancer.org product roadmap (as always a work in progress)