Updated July 2026. This article has been revised to reflect the technical evolution of the SKUDONET platform since the Zevenet rebrand, including advances in traffic management, application security, operations, deployment flexibility and managed cloud delivery.

From Rebrand to Platform Evolution

In 2023, Zevenet became SKUDONET, marking a new stage in the development of the same load-balancing and application-delivery technology.

The name changed, but the engineering foundation, technical expertise and central objective remained: helping organizations keep critical applications available, responsive and protected.

Since then, SKUDONET has continued to evolve beyond traditional load balancing. Its development has expanded across application delivery, high availability, traffic control, security, automation, observability and flexible deployment models.

This evolution reflects a broader objective: giving infrastructure and security teams greater control over application traffic without forcing them to operate several disconnected delivery and security products.

Advances in Traffic Management and Application Delivery

Traffic management remains a core part of the SKUDONET platform.

Improvements to Weighted Round Robin make HTTP/S request distribution follow configured backend weights more consistently. Administrators can use those weights to reflect differences in backend capacity or operational priority.

Support for fully qualified domain names as HTTP backend addresses also improves flexibility when backend endpoints are managed through DNS rather than fixed IP addresses. This is useful in distributed and cloud environments, although it should not be confused with a complete service-discovery system.

HTTP/S profiling provides request-level timing information that helps operators identify delays in proxy processing, backend communication and surrounding network infrastructure. These diagnostics complement application performance monitoring rather than replacing it.

More recent Enterprise releases have also expanded support for HTTP/2. Enterprise Edition 10.2.0 introduced configurable HTTP/2 listeners for HTTPS farms. Version 10.2.1 added advanced Layer 7 routing for HTTP/2 traffic, together with improvements to URL rewriting, backend health checks, migration handling and SNI forwarding to secure backends.

These developments support application environments distributed across data centres, virtual platforms, public cloud services and hybrid architectures.

High Availability, Resilience, and Infrastructure Control

Application delivery is not only about distributing traffic. It is also about maintaining service continuity when servers, network paths or delivery components become unavailable.

Enterprise Edition supports high-availability clustering with configuration synchronization and replication of supported connection or session state. This can reduce disruption during failover, although the result depends on the traffic profile, persistence method, application behaviour and network topology.

Health monitoring is provided through built-in checks and customizable Farmguardian probes. These checks allow the ADC to stop directing new traffic to an unavailable or unhealthy backend and to return it to service after recovery.

The 10.1 branch extended hot-reload behaviour for HTTP/S farms. Supported changes, such as adding or removing backends, can be applied without a full farm restart. Later updates improved backend-state concurrency and the reliability of WAF rule reloads while farms were processing active traffic.

Enterprise Edition also supports Virtual IPs, VLANs, source and destination NAT, DSR, static routing and data-link load balancing for uplinks. Its DNS-based GSLB module can direct users to available services across locations using health status and DNS response policies.

These capabilities give organizations control over local, distributed and geographically separated traffic flows without treating all availability scenarios as identical.

Security and Visibility Improvements

Security has become a central part of SKUDONET’s evolution, but its different protection layers must be understood separately.

The Web Application Firewall operates on HTTP/S traffic at Layer 7. For encrypted services, inspection takes place after TLS termination inside the ADC. Using ModSecurity-compatible rules and OWASP Core Rule Set policies, the WAF can identify patterns associated with SQL injection, cross-site scripting, protocol violations and other application-layer attacks.

The WAF is part of the wider IPDS framework. IPDS also includes reputation-based blocklists, real-time block-list checks and configurable DoS/DDoS controls. These mechanisms can filter known malicious sources, malformed traffic and abusive connection or request patterns before they consume backend resources.

They should not, however, be described as complete protection against every DDoS scenario. Large volumetric attacks that saturate the upstream connection may still require mitigation from an ISP, cloud provider or dedicated scrubbing service.

WAF administration has also become more flexible. Enterprise operators can upload rule files, create custom SecLang or Lua content, apply rulesets to selected services, review detected transactions, use customized deny responses and compare factory rules with locally modified versions.

Enterprise Edition 10.1.3 and 10.1.4 added configurable fail-fast processing. This allows the IPDS engine to stop evaluating a request after a blocking condition has been met, reducing unnecessary processing. The releases also corrected OWASP CRS phase handling and improved WAF validation and reload consistency.

IPDS reports, statistics and graphical views provide visibility into detected events and traffic patterns. In Enterprise Edition 10.2.1, request duration logging was also corrected for transactions denied by the WAF, improving diagnostic consistency.

The Ignore X-Forwarded-For directive can discard client-supplied XFF values and derive source information from the TCP connection observed by the ADC. In architectures that use CDNs or trusted reverse proxies, header trust must instead be configured carefully so that the real client address is preserved without accepting spoofed input.

TLS capabilities include certificate lifecycle management, protocol and cipher configuration, TLS termination, optional encryption to backends, SNI handling and automated certificate renewal. Recent releases have also improved secure cookie attributes, certificate-provider integrations, HSTS behaviour and SNI compatibility.

In 2024, SKUDONET announced its sponsorship of OWASP and its active participation in the OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set project. Through this collaboration, SKUDONET can propose improvements, contribute technical feedback and help refine the security rules used by ModSecurity-compatible WAFs.

This upstream participation is complemented by product-level engineering. Enterprise Edition releases published in 2026 improved the way SKUDONET validates, loads and processes OWASP CRS rules, including more accurate execution across the appropriate WAF inspection phases.

User Experience, Automation, and Operations

Technical capability is useful only when teams can operate it reliably.

The graphical interface has been progressively redesigned with more consistent navigation, responsive layouts, clearer status information and dark mode. Enterprise Edition moved from Angular 18 to Angular 20 in version 10.0.13, while Community Edition 7.2.1 remains documented with an Angular 18 interface.

Operational improvements introduced during 2025 included AutoUpdate and a graphical Farm Diagram view. The diagram helps administrators understand the structure and status of a farm, while AutoUpdate can reduce manual patch-management work when configured according to the organization’s maintenance policy.

SKUDONET provides a REST API using JSON payloads, together with the skd-cli command-line client, for scripted administration and integration with provisioning and operational workflows.

These interfaces can support:

  • Configuration management.
  • Service provisioning.
  • Automated deployment workflows.
  • Integration with external orchestration systems.
  • Scripted maintenance and reporting.
  • Monitoring and status collection.

The presence of an API makes SKUDONET suitable for infrastructure-as-code pipelines, but the level of integration depends on the external tooling and automation developed around it.

Logging and observability have also evolved. HTTP/S access views, profiling timers, WAF transaction identifiers, IPDS reporting and API statistics help teams diagnose traffic and security events. Data can be integrated with external monitoring systems through mechanisms such as REST APIs, SNMP, syslog forwarding and exported logs.

Enterprise Edition 10.0.13 also improved statistics API performance, API login auditability, secure cookie handling and external rsyslog behaviour.

Enterprise Edition Evolution

Enterprise Edition 10 began a new operating-system generation for SKUDONET.

The initial 10.0.0 release was introduced on Debian 12, using the Debian 12.5 point release at launch. Subsequent releases have continued to update the kernel, packages and security fixes within that operating-system generation. For example, Enterprise Edition 10.0.13 moved to kernel 6.1.153.

As of July 2026, the latest publicly documented Enterprise Edition version is 10.2.1.

The 10.x lifecycle has included improvements to:

  • L4 and L7 traffic management.
  • HTTP/2 delivery and routing.
  • High-availability operations.
  • WAF accuracy and rule management.
  • TLS and certificate handling.
  • REST API and statistics performance.
  • Automatic updates.
  • Logging, diagnostics and auditability.
  • User-interface responsiveness.
  • Migration and configuration reliability.

The lifecycle has also included regular product, dependency and operating-system security fixes. Organizations running critical applications should therefore treat supported updates as part of the platform’s security model rather than only as a way to obtain new features.

Enterprise Edition is intended for organizations that need advanced traffic management, high availability, application security, operational controls, RBAC and professional support. Access to maintained updates and support depends on the applicable subscription or support plan.

Community Edition Evolution

Community Edition continues the project’s open-source foundation.

Community Edition 7.2.0 introduced the open-source IPDS WAF module using ModSecurity v3. The latest publicly documented maintenance release is 7.2.1, published on a Debian 12.8 base with an Angular 18 web interface.

The WAF engine allows administrators to create and manage ModSecurity-compatible SecLang rules and Lua extensions. To protect an application, a compatible ruleset such as OWASP CRS must be installed, assigned to the relevant HTTP/S farm, activated, tested and tuned.

Once configured, the WAF can inspect application traffic for patterns associated with SQL injection, cross-site scripting and other HTTP-layer attacks. It should not be described as automatic protection against every vulnerability or as a complete network-level DDoS solution.

Community Edition also includes core L4 and L7 load balancing, a management API, basic clustering and networking capabilities. It is appropriate for laboratories, development, education, smaller deployments and teams that can operate and maintain an open-source ADC themselves.

Enterprise Edition adds broader traffic-management and security functionality, more advanced high-availability and operational controls, maintained update channels, RBAC and professional support.

Deployment Flexibility

Modern application environments rarely operate in a single location or infrastructure model.

The Enterprise portfolio includes the SVA10000 Virtual Appliance, the SBA10000 Bare Metal Appliance and dedicated Hardware Appliance options.

The Virtual Appliance is delivered as a preconfigured virtual-machine image for supported hypervisors and virtualization formats. The Bare Metal Appliance is installed directly on compatible x86-64 hardware, giving organizations greater control over physical resources and network interfaces. Hardware Appliances combine SKUDONET software with preconfigured dedicated equipment.

Enterprise Edition can also be deployed in supported public-cloud environments under a self-managed model. In this case, the customer remains responsible for the instance, network architecture, sizing, updates and availability design.

These deployment options provide a consistent application-delivery model while allowing performance, network integration and operational responsibility to be adapted to physical, virtual, cloud and hybrid environments.

Exact appliance models, hypervisor compatibility, marketplace availability and performance specifications should always be checked against the current product documentation.

Extending Application Delivery Through SkudoCloud

Launched in July 2025, SkudoCloud added a managed delivery model alongside  (rather than in place of) Community Edition and the self-managed Enterprise appliance portfolio.

SkudoCloud allows organizations to consume load balancing and application protection without deploying or maintaining the underlying ADC infrastructure themselves.

Depending on the selected plan and service configuration, SkudoCloud can provide managed traffic delivery, health checks, session persistence, WAF, DoS/DDoS controls, bot filtering, TLS automation, role-based access and centralized monitoring.

The service includes high-availability endpoints and managed platform operations. Automatic updates and infrastructure recovery are handled by SKUDONET, while customers remain responsible for their application backends, DNS changes, policy configuration and the security of the applications being published.

SkudoCloud should not be described as identical to Enterprise Edition or as providing every Enterprise feature in every plan. It represents a different responsibility model: the platform is managed as a service, and the available capacity and security functions depend on the contracted plan.

This gives the SKUDONET portfolio a range of operating models, from self-managed open-source deployments to Enterprise appliances and managed cloud delivery.

What This Evolution Means in Practice

The technical evolution of SKUDONET is intended to reduce operational fragmentation while giving organizations greater control over traffic, availability and application security.

For infrastructure teams, this means choosing between physical, virtual, cloud and managed deployment models.

For security teams, it means placing WAF, reputation controls and selected DoS protections at the same point where traffic is terminated and distributed.

For IT leaders, it creates the option to consolidate functions that might otherwise require separate load balancers, reverse proxies, WAF products and management interfaces.

Maddalena S.p.A., a company specializing in water and thermal-energy measurement, used SKUDONET to simplify an infrastructure that previously depended on Nginx, Apache and HAProxy for reverse-proxy and load-balancing functions.

The company deployed two SKUDONET Virtual Appliances to create a high-availability cluster, centralizing application traffic management, load balancing and reverse-proxy operations while applying the integrated WAF to protect critical services.

Maddalena also uses SkudoCloud as the external entry point to its infrastructure. At this layer, incoming traffic is evaluated using configurable DDoS mitigation controls, botnet filtering and reputation-based blocklists. Traffic identified as malicious or untrusted is rejected before reaching the internal environment, while accepted requests are forwarded to the on-premises SKUDONET infrastructure and application services.

According to the published customer case, this architecture improved operational simplicity, application performance and security. Maddalena also highlighted the reliability of the platform, the quality of the technical support and the cost of implementation.

Looking Ahead

SKUDONET is the technical continuation and strategic evolution of Zevenet.

The platform has moved beyond traditional load balancing toward a broader Application Delivery and Security model combining availability, traffic management, application protection, automation and deployment flexibility.

Recent releases show continued engineering work around HTTP/2 delivery, WAF accuracy, automation, observability, certificate management and operational reliability.

The name changed in 2023. The engineering foundation remained. The platform has continued to evolve around the operational requirements of organizations running critical applications.

To understand the background to the transition, read From Zevenet to SKUDONET: Same Team, New Brand.

For detailed release history and configuration guidance, consult the SKUDONET Timeline and Knowledge Base.