Power Distributed Applications with F5 and Google Cloud

Distributed app architectures are growing increasingly popular, as their decentralized structure offers greater reliability, performance, and cost optimization. Every one of the few hundred organizations surveyed by the Enterprise Strategy Group maintained at least a few distributed applications, and 51% managed about 100 or more inter-cloud application integrations.¹

However, distributed apps present operational and security risks that organizations must address if they hope to successfully realize the benefits. These challenges include connecting distributed apps and microservices, protecting the expanded attack surface from cyber threats, and ensuring performance with limited visibility.

Together, F5 and Google Cloud address these hurdles by enabling organizations to build and run adaptive, distributed applications across multicloud environments with simplified management and frictionless security.

As a multicloud-friendly major cloud provider, Google Cloud delivers extensive capabilities to power distributed application architecture. A Kubernetes-based developer workflow enables teams to build, deploy, and scale modern apps everywhere.

Deploying distributed apps in multiple clouds can be a complicated task, as each cloud provider often has its own tools and processes. F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect vastly simplifies deployment by using automation and infrastructure as code (IaC) to provision resources and maintain consistent policies across sites. It provides service discovery and advertisement for distributed Kubernetes clusters for seamless app-to-app communication. 

Distributed Cloud App Connect delivers app-layer networking that steers clear of IP overlap and routing issues. By using either the F5 Global Network or Google Cloud’s private network, businesses gain a secure backbone for app-to-app communication that circumvents the public Internet.

With architectures typically comprised of multiple cloud providers and containerized environments, distributed applications provide a large attack surface that’s harder to defend.

Distributed Cloud App Connect offers multi-layered security, including native end-to-end encryption, ingress and egress control, and consistent, granular security policies in every environment. Add to that F5 Distributed Cloud Web App and API Protection (WAAP) to safeguard apps with web application firewalls (WAFs), DDoS protection, bot defense, and API security. All Distributed Cloud Services offerings use the same SaaS-based console for centralized management.

Security teams can leverage Google Cloud Armor to protect their applications against DDoS attacks and OWASP Top 10 threats. Organizations can further augment Google Cloud’s robust native security with F5’s multicloud-friendly portfolio of security solutions. Plus, F5 zero trust capabilities for identity-aware and location-aware application firewalls complement Google Cloud’s zero trust approach to infrastructure for a layered defense.

In a multicloud environment, visibility is often disjointed, making it difficult to monitor app performance. Distributed Cloud App Connect provides application-level dashboards with performance metrics and insights. This helps DevOps teams identify performance issues across sites before they become noticeable slowdowns or outages, instead of having to piece together data from multiple tools. Performance is also maintained through intelligent load balancing. Together, these keep apps fast and available for users.