Now Available: F5 in the Google Cloud!

F5 is excited to announce the newest development in its public cloud story, as the BIG-IP Virtual Edition (VE) is available for the Google Cloud. Following continued adoption of the Google Cloud amongst enterprises, F5 is extending support for its industry-leading application delivery services to the Google Compute Engine (the IaaS component of the Google Cloud), allowing customers to enhance their application availability, performance, and security by integrating F5 services into their Google Cloud architectures.

For years, enterprises have trusted F5’s broad array of application services in a variety of public cloud environments. These offerings include advanced local and global load balancing, SSL decryption/encryption, access control and ID federation, DDoS mitigation at both the network and application level, and application security. And keeping in line with F5’s vision of enabling consistency across cloud environments, the same breadth of solutions and robustness of features currently available in other F5-supported cloud platforms are available on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as well. This provides the ability to deploy consistent traffic, security, and automation policies across all of your cloud deployments, giving you the freedom to use the same industry-leading app services wherever your app resides. Whether located in the Google Cloud or another supported cloud, you can more easily transport your applications between cloud platforms, with the confidence that your BIG-IP VE configuration in one environment will be replicable in the next.

BIG-IP VE images are available from the Google Cloud Launcher – Google's marketplace equivalent – through a BYOL (Bring Your Own License) offering. That means that you buy the BIG-IP license you want through F5, then download and deploy directly from the public cloud marketplace of your choice (in this case, Google Cloud Launcher). We are working on making PAYG (Pay As You Go) deployment models available soon.

Today, F5 has Good, Better, and Best bundles available for deployment from Google Cloud Launcher, providing optimal value and purchasing simplicity when acquiring F5 services. All core BIG-IP modules, including BIG-IP LTM, DNS, AFM, ASM, and APM, are available within these bundles, and to ensure there’s a package to suit your needs, a range of throughputs – including 25 Mbps, 200 Mbps, 1 Gbps, and 5 Gbps – are available. And as the most recent F5-supported cloud, you can take comfort from the fact that offerings will have been subject to intensive verification testing on GCP to ensure full VE compatibility, allowing you to confidently deploy your applications with F5.

If you’re new to F5 and the BIG-IP system seems a little daunting, F5 can lend a helping hand in getting you up and running quickly, as we have made several Google instance templates available at launch from GitHub, enabling users to deploy a variety of fully functioning VEs – each with varying configurations – into their virtual network at the click of a button. What’s more, you can try our solutions out on GCP free of charge (at least on our end anyway) by taking advantage of our brand new free trial license, which allows full access to the most recent versions of BIG-IP for 90 days, so you’ll have long enough to get fully comfortable and up to speed with the BIG-IP system – while we make your apps go. Faster. Smarter. Safer.