Islands No More

With the explosion in traffic and staggering number of devices – or “things” – now connected to the Internet, our customers are dealing with a veritable archipelago of applications, moving from the data center to the cloud and back again. While our data shows that half of the companies we surveyed around the world in our 2016 State of Application Delivery report run an average of 201 or more applications, 20% of these companies run over a thousand!

In other words, apps are everywhere.

But the result of this application sprawl is a whole new set of challenges. Our customers want to accommodate new, more agile operational principles like DevOps, yet they are managing with poor visibility into their application’s health and transactions, they must deal with wildly divergent APIs, they lack security policy controls; and most importantly – they frequently manage inconsistent application services across established and emerging environments in the data center, the public or private cloud. This can quickly become very taxing operationally on any organization – imagine it for a small business with limited IT resources.

We want to simplify these challenges for our customers.

With the introduction of the BIG-IP iSeries platform today, our aim is to give our customers the freedom to deploy any application, anywhere, with consistent application services and security.

Comprised of both hardware and software components, the BIG-IP platform works as a bridge across these islands of apps and environments, ranging from the data center to the cloud. How do we achieve that?

First, by simplifying and automating deployment of the app services required for apps to move from “ready” to “live” in the production environment. Native orchestration via open, standards-based APIs and toolsets like Eclipse and F5’s iWorkflow provide the means to plug-in app services to private cloud-ready stacks like OpenStack and Cisco with speed. “Write once, deploy many” capabilities by synchronizing BIG-IP policies to virtual editions (VE) is now available, simplifying and standardizing policies across applications. By extending the scripting capabilities of BIG-IP with node.js, via iRules LX™, developers and operations alike will be able to tailor application delivery on-demand.

Second, by delivering ecosystem-friendly orchestration. With the addition of the Application Services Proxy and the Container Connector to our software portfolio, we can make it simple for our customers to use and integrate the iSeries with management and orchestration tools popular in DevOps environments, such as Kubernetes and Mesos/Marathon.

And third, with hardware that can be updated like software, we deliver DevOps levels of agility in hardware while future-proofing IT infrastructure. The iSeries brings with it two to three times the performance of prior generations, allowing our customers’ investment in hardware to follow business growth – not be held back by the onslaught of encrypted traffic, overprovisioning or additional rack space.

The iSeries allows our customers to decide the environment that is best for their app, and their business – not be forced to compromise for the sake of security or control.

For more information on the BIG-IP iSeries and its technologies, please visit: https://f5.com/products/big-ip.