New Solutions Enable the Multi-Cloud World

We live in a time in which you can upgrade your car’s features and capabilities from your phone, confidently enlist people you’ve never met to help you explore new corners of the world and access sensitive personal data from any device at any time.

Constraints we aren’t even aware of fall away seemingly overnight as innovators push the limits of the sharing economy, IoT, and machine learning. Your business is able to deepen your relationships with customers, create new value, and drive greater profitability.

It has become a world driven by applications…applications that enable change...on a scale and at a speed never before considered. Simply said: Applications change our world.

Whether providing a platform for connecting with customers or running the complex internal systems that make it all happen, applications are the engine that drives transformation – business and social. And the backbone of this technology-driven transformation is the cloud. For many customers, the immense, complex undertaking of moving and building applications in the cloud is well under way. In fact, we found in our recent State of Application Delivery 2017 study that:

• 32% of customers have purchased solutions for the public cloud
• 20% will have half of their applications in the cloud
• 80% are committed to multi-cloud architectures

However, as technologies mature and competition intensifies, there is growing pressure on CIOs and their teams to accelerate this transformation. Customers were promised greater agility, on-demand scale, and lower costs. But as they dig in, customers are finding the journey to the cloud isn’t as easy or inexpensive as advertised. While customers need the same types of services to deliver, manage, and protect applications in the cloud as they do in the data center, this is easier said than done – especially when dealing with more than one cloud provider.

Applications across multiple cloud providers with differing services and technologies create undue complexity that often manifests itself in unexpected ways. And in many cases, the use of proprietary application services leads to a lack of application portability that is needed in multi-cloud architectures. This is made difficult by the significant functional differences between clouds themselves. Managing different services in multiple clouds costs customers through inefficient resource allocation, longer time to service, and increased time to market.

These challenges do little to change the fact that network operations teams are still accountable for security, policy enforcement, and compliance. The cloud service provider only delivers a platform on which to operate an application. Their responsibility ends before the critical work of provisioning application services and policy begins.

In November, we talked about our vision to power intelligent application services. Our aim is to give customers the ability to succeed and thrive in the market both today and well into the future, all with the stability, security, and compliance they require. That means helping companies overcome these challenges so they have the freedom to deploy any application, anywhere, with consistent delivery.

This week at Agility – our customer and partner conference taking place in Barcelona – we are bringing that vision to life. From the mainstage this week, I’ll be making several announcements that help make this multi-platform, multi-cloud, threat-riddled, overly complex world a little bit safer and easier to manage.

First, we’re delivering new public cloud solutions to help you accelerate application deployment on more cloud platforms.

• Google Cloud availability. Now you can find us in Google! Together with AWS and Azure, we’re giving customers more cloud choice.
• Cloud solution templates for AWS, Azure, and Google available on GitHub reduce the complexity of moving applications to the cloud.
• Integrated marketplace solutions like Azure WAF and Office 365 allow companies to bring their trusted F5 technology with them to the cloud.

Second, we are introducing new private cloud solutions that enable organizations to move to the cloud faster and with more confidence.

• Certified private cloud packages, starting with OpenStack, get customers up and running quickly.
• Cloud solution templates, also starting with OpenStack, lessen the complexity of deploying private clouds.

Third, we recently released a solution set that delivers application services in container environments.

• Lightweight Application Services Proxy gives customers flexibility in developing, testing, and scaling applications in cloud and container environments.
• Container Connector allows for easy provisioning of services for containerized applications and simple integration of capabilities from management/orchestration frameworks including Kubernetes and Mesos/Marathon. 

And finally, for those customers looking for better performance and control across public clouds, we have a new cloud interconnect solution, Application Connector. Application Connector delivers application services from the edge of the cloud by automatically discovering cloud-hosted instances and connecting them to the customer’s data center or hosted location.

We believe that this is a time of unprecedented opportunity to digitally enhance your business and transform your customers' experience. Cloud and automation tools will bring you the agility and speed to deliver transformational applications, particularly if you adopt them with the security, availability, and confidence your business and customers demand. 

Whether you are deploying into multiple public clouds, adopting containers, or automating your deployments in a private cloud, F5 has the partnerships and the technology you need to deliver consistent application security, availability, and scale wherever you need it.