F5 Networks has announced the availability of offerings designed to provide consistent application services in multi-cloud environments – giving companies greater deployment flexibility more effective security and faster time to market.
F5’s 2017 State of Application Delivery Report shows that while more customers than ever are shifting to cloud infrastructures, many are consciously choosing to invest in multiple cloud technologies. Eighty-six percent of the respondents report that they are committed to multi-cloud architectures, and 20% state that they will have over half their applications running in the public and/or private clouds this year. With this move to leverage multi-cloud environments, unexpected hurdles often present themselves: application deployments across multiple cloud platforms create challenges in managing application services; inconsistent security policies create compliance risks; and multiple cloud architectures put more pressure on IT skills gaps, and diminish the return on the cloud’s value.
“Customers are increasingly choosing to deploy applications in multiple clouds – public and private, in colocation facilities, and in their own data centres – but are struggling with the management of different development environments, tool sets, and orchestration technologies,” says Martin Walshaw, senior engineer at F5. “Where these clouds provide services for applications, they often do so in ways that are not portable enough, are use-case specific, or provide inadequate protection. F5’s portfolio of multi-cloud application services and solutions gives customers the freedom to deploy any application – anywhere – with consistent application services and enterprise-grade security.”
New public cloud solutions that help deploy applications faster in any cloud
• F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition (VE) is available in the Google Cloud Platform. F5 is giving customers greater choice of cloud platforms, with new ‘bring-your-own license’ offers for instances ranging from 25Mbps to 5Gbps. With the inclusion of Google Cloud, F5 services are now available in all major public clouds. Available at Google Cloud Launcher in Good, Better and Best versions.
• Cloud solution templates for Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google reduce the complexity of deploying F5 services for applications in the public cloud. These new solution-specific templates simplify and automate common public cloud use cases. Cloud solution templates are also available for OpenStack private cloud environments. Available now on GitHub.
• Integrated marketplace solutions provide easily accessible, pre-packaged F5 services such as WAF and Office 365 federated access that are deployable directly from public cloud marketplaces, meaning companies can leverage their trusted F5 services easily for applications in the cloud. Available now at Azure Marketplace.
New private cloud solutions that enable organisations to move to the cloud faster and with more confidence
• Private cloud package gets customers up and running quickly with pre-tested, certified, and bundled F5 solutions that simplify and automate OpenStack private cloud deployments. Available now through F5 Sales.
Broad line of additional solutions that deliver application services in new environments
• Lightweight Application Services Proxy gives customers flexibility in developing, testing, and scaling applications in container environments. Available now at Docker Store.
• Container Connector provides the easy deployment of app services in containerised environments, and simple integration of capabilities into management/orchestration systems including Kubernetes and Mesos/Marathon. Available now at GitHub and Docker Hub.
• Application Connector delivers application services insertion from the edge of the public cloud by automatically discovering cloud-hosted workloads in AWS, and securely connecting any cloud provider to the customer’s interconnection or data centre. Available now through F5 Sales.
“Business executives are beginning to rely heavily on cloud solutions in support of their digital transformation efforts, but in many cases, single cloud deployments are insufficient to enable true business agility,” says Walshaw. “Unfortunately, multi-cloud frameworks are complex and IT must take the steps needed to mitigate the challenges of operating in these mixed worlds. With F5’s multi-cloud portfolio of products, IT can deliver consistent and secure application services in any environment needed for business velocity.”