F5 BIG-IP Cloud Edition – More Flexibility for your Apps

Posted on: 22/08/2018   By:admin

This is the first part of our F5 BIG-IP Cloud Edition series blog; in the second part we’ll explain technical specifications of the newest F5 product in more detail.

F5 recently added a new product to its portfolio – F5 BIG-IP Cloud Edition – keeping pace with global trends that slowly but surely revolve around Cloud environments. F5 BIG-IP Cloud Edition is a per-app virtual Application Delivery Controller (ADC) that provides dedicated virtual instances for individual apps, focusing on ease-of-deployment, manageability, and automation.

Modern businesses are based on apps which are rapidly growing in number and day-to-day complexity – F5’s recent State of Application Delivery research reveals that the average organization relies on 16 different services to make their apps responsive, safe and available. Many vendors and open-source organizations offer basic app-delivery services, but do not and cannot provide the level of flexibility and security required to safeguard transactions carried out via apps and all the data being transferred through the communication channel. BIG-IP Cloud Edition makes it easy to deploy all applications and ensure high-level security with F5 Local Traffic Manager and F5 Advanced Web Application Firewall. Provides continuous deployment capability and security for existing and new applications. BIG-IP per-app virtual ADCs achieve the same scalable, secure, and customizable services of traditional physical and virtual F5 BIG-IP ADCs – using a different pricing model.

How does it all work?

BIG-IP Cloud Edition is a mix of 2 products – BIG-IP Per-App VE and BIG-IQ Centralized Management 6.0. Per-App VE can be quickly implemented for each application, offering traffic management and application security at two bandwidth levels: 25Mbps or 200 Mbps. Each VE in this model is used to provide services to a single app which means that the licenses are more cost-effective, software images are smaller and deployment times shorter – which is in line with the necessities of modern application development.

BIG-IQ provides single pane-of-glass central point for deploying, managing, and monitoring applications with numerous predefined templates for defining various network and security parameters required by each individual app. BIG-IQ has a simple dashboard that allows you to track application performance and manage individual network administrator’s tasks. BIG-IQ can be integrated with your user database to achieve granular access control:

  • App owners can see and access only and exclusively their own apps. Application teams can implement all necessary services, monitor performance, identify and resolve any issues without engaging a wider IT team
  • Network engineers can leverage pre-built templates or create their own custom templates that app owners can spin-up and deploy, along with predefined security policies and network resource monitoring
  • Your SecOps team can specify WAF policies and all safety parameters required to suitably protect apps

In short, F5 BIG-IP Cloud Edition provides maximum segmentation and automation for achieving best possible performance.

In addition, compliance with F5’s principles means that everything is highly customizable to suit your specific needs and requirements of various environments.