High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! An application delivery controller (ADC) is a network device in the datacenter that helps perform common tasks done by web sites in an effort to remove load from the web servers themselves. Many also provide load balancing. They usually sit between the firewall/router and the web farm. The ADC is in many cases described as the next generation load balancer. They tend to offer more advanced features such as content manipulation, advanced routing strategies as well as highly configurable server health monitoring. ADCs tend to offer features like compression, cache, connection multiplexing, application layer security, SSL offload, content switching combined with basic server load balancing.