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Announcing Availability of Google Cloud’s Anthos with F5 Container Ingress Services

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Tom Atkins
Published April 09, 2019

Container adoption is growing. Fast.

According to the latest Portworx survey a staggering 82% of companies are now running containers, with 83% of their use coming in production environments. What’s more interesting is the rationale supporting this transition to containers. When asked the primary reason behind running containers, the most common response (32%) was to increase developer efficiency. But coming in a close 2nd (30%) was the desire to enable apps to run in multiple environments and increase multi-cloud portability, which jumped from just 18% in the previous year’s survey.

In July of 2018, Google Cloud announced the Beta of its GKE On-Prem solution, which enables its customers to easily move GKE-based containers to a replica Kubernetes environment within the sanctity of their own private data center. In doing so, it provides users the ability to create a near perfect hybrid architecture, where clusters can be monitored, managed and scaled across clouds from a centralized console. But offering centralized orchestration, as well as homogenous environments, aren’t the only criteria required for fashioning a truly hybrid cloud. The application services supporting those containers must also be replicable across platforms to ensure a consistent security posture and limited variation in the end-user experience.

Making your containers even more portable

As you may be aware, F5 application services can already be applied to containers running within GKE. Using Container Ingress Services – which integrates natively with the Kubernetes orchestrator – and BIG-IP, customers are able to deliver F5’s broad suite of traffic management and security services to their containers while easily orchestrating app services insertion. With the general availability of GKE On-Prem (a core component of Google Cloud’s Anthos) today, F5 is delighted to reveal its integration with this new solution, allowing its users to get one step closer to crafting a truly hybrid cloud architecture. Your Docker containers can now be freely moved and scaled across GKE and GKE On-Prem, while F5 works with Kubernetes to ensure your apps receive the advanced services they require. By the looks of it, your containers just got even more portable…

Finally, through recognition of F5’s position as an ADC market leader and by customer request, Google Cloud has made F5’s BIG-IP a key capability of their GKE On-Prem solution for network load balancing. As such, GKE On-Prem will come pre-packaged with F5’s Container Ingress Services Controller to streamline the provisioning process for F5 customers.

For more information about F5’s solutions on Google Cloud, visit this page.