How F5 NGINX One Helps Platform Operations Teams Tackle Real Challenges

Michelle Ensey

Published January 24, 2025

Platform Operations teams are at the heart of managing Kubernetes clusters and cloud-native environments, enabling developers to become more self-sufficient while moving faster. But succeeding comes with real challenges. Daily headaches include juggling configuration drift, automating version control, ensuring patches are applied seamlessly, and managing certificates. It's particularly difficult in the application delivery tier, where developers are now asked to self-service but generally have less experience or expertise.

Platform engineers must also curate and advocate for tools that help them collaborate with security and network teams during high-pressure moments, like mitigating volumetric distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks or responding to incidents and security breaches. As more regulations emerge, Platform Operations teams and Platform Operations personnel play a critical role in ensuring full compliance with all applications across widely distributed deployments and diverse environments – cloud, on-premises, Kubernetes, and hybrid.

These challenges become even more complicated when artificial intelligence (AI) applications enter the mix. Data and compute-hungry machine learning and AI inferencing are creating new application delivery patterns along with entirely novel application infrastructure requirements. Even hardware selection—CPU, GPU, DPU, TPU—that was formerly relatively easy now can make or break operational costs or radically improve security and developer productivity. Platform Operations teams not only have to deliver on their promise for the previous generation of applications but also for this brave new world. For Platform Ops teams, the application delivery value chain (ADVC) is particularly crucial because its principles—unified ownership, security integration, performance focus, and automation/simplification—align tightly with the overarching platform vision.

F5 NGINX One provides a critical layer to facilitate collaboration and allow teams to work together using standardized templates and unified tooling across all application and infrastructure environments. This post explores how NGINX One achieves this and can be leveraged to drive operational excellence, innovation, and reduced risk.

Reducing complexity, improving productivity and security

Platform Operations teams serve as the critical intermediary and coordinator between the four personas required to deliver modern applications—network operations, security operations, application development, and developer operations. To be clear, their role extends far beyond simple intermediation. They've evolved from traditional IT operations to become strategic enablers of digital transformation, responsible for creating the conditions that allow organizations to innovate rapidly while maintaining stability and security. While Platform Operations is technically a technology responsibility, in the modern era of digital transformation, this role can directly contribute to business success by improving the ROI of technology spend and reducing execution and security risks while also accelerating innovation.

Platform Ops teams are not just problem-solvers but also enablers of innovation, tasked with fostering an environment where development teams can thrive while safeguarding the broader organization. Platform Operations leaders must curate and manage application development and deployment tools, creating “paved paths” and guardrails for developers, supporting security best practices, and delivering application development and API development innovation—increasingly including AI capabilities. They also must keep security and network teams in the loop and develop tooling for application delivery, management, and security that is used by all relevant teams. This role has become increasingly challenging as applications become more distributed and environments more diverse with many more components.

Transforming platform operations

NGINX One is a unified application delivery platform incorporating all of the NGINX products used for secure application delivery in any environment. It includes a SaaS-based console for managing, observing, and securing all NGINX instances across open source, commercial, and Kubernetes.

The SaaS console offers simple and automated discovery of NGINX instances. Once instances are linked to NGINX One, the console and the NGINX One API can aggregate all instance information into a single system of record. This can be consumed either in the F5 Distributed Cloud Services console or within third-party tools for observability, application performance tracking, and application component management. NGINX One provides a critical unification and visualization layer that offers a complete picture of application behaviors status, with hundreds of available metrics.

Benefits of NGINX One for Platform Ops teams include unified environments, security integrations, performance optimization, and cross-team collaboration across all environments. Specific features include:

Standardized deployment templates: Templates for NGINX configurations can easily be created and maintained to ensure consistency and best practices across all deployments.
Simplified configuration management across environments: Configurations can be centrally managed, making it easy to track changes and maintain consistency.
Automated policy enforcement: Organizational policies for security, performance, and resource utilization can be defined and automatically enforced.
Reduced configuration drift: Regular automated checks ensure configurations remain compliant with established standards and quickly identify any deviations.
Visibility into CVEs and security vulnerabilities: Security vulnerabilities are automatically scanned and reported across all NGINX instances, with severity ratings and remediation recommendations.
Automated security policy enforcement: Security policies can be consistently implemented and enforced across all environments, from development to production.
Support for zero-trust implementations: Built-in capabilities for implementing zero-trust architecture, including certificate management and authentication controls.
Real-time application performance monitoring: Detailed metrics and analytics provide insights into application performance, latency, and throughput.
Identification of bottlenecks and optimization opportunities: Advanced analytics help pinpoint performance issues and suggest optimization strategies.
Resource utilization tracking: Comprehensive monitoring of CPU, memory, and network resources across all NGINX instances.

Delivering business value

By deploying NGINX One, Platform Operations teams can improve business value. Key benefits include:

Reduced operational toil: Automation of discovery, configuration, and policy enforcement minimizes repetitive manual tasks, allowing teams to focus on strategic objectives like improving application performance and scaling infrastructure efficiently.
Accelerated problem resolution: Unified visibility across the application delivery stack enables faster identification and resolution of issues, reducing downtime and improving user satisfaction. This makes it easier to ensure critical services remain available, even during peak demand or unexpected failures.
Enhanced developer productivity: By standardizing tools, practices, and workflows, Platform Ops teams create an environment where developers can build and deploy applications with greater speed and consistency and spend less time acquiring “tribal knowledge.”
Strengthened security posture: Integrated security features, such as real-time threat detection, automated policy enforcement, and robust encryption, proactively address vulnerabilities and ensure compliance with regulatory standards.
Optimized costs: Advanced insights into resource utilization and performance enable organizations to eliminate waste, right-size infrastructure, and make informed decisions about scaling—particularly in environments where costs may be harder to calculate, such as multicloud, AI applications, or Kubernetes.

NGINX One + Platform Ops: the perfect pair

F5 NGINX One transforms the work of Platform Operations by providing the tools and visibility needed to effectively manage modern application delivery. By enabling teams to move from reactive management and siloed roles to proactive optimization and easy collaboration, NGINX One makes modern application delivery more efficient, secure, transparent, and scalable.

For Platform Operations teams looking to improve their application delivery capabilities while reducing operational complexity, NGINX One offers a comprehensive solution that aligns with the modern approach. It's not just about managing NGINX instances—it's about enabling Platform Operations teams to better serve their organization's needs in an increasingly complex digital landscape.

Learn how NGINX One and the new Application Delivery Value Chain framework can solve your application and API delivery challenges. Download the eBook.