New developments include NGINX acquisition and Kubernetes Ingress Controller 1.5 release, expanded multi-cloud application services and F5’s service mesh offering
Vincent Lavergne, RVP Systems Engineering, F5 Networks, said: “F5 is proud to work with organisations to realise their digital transformation ambitions and truly optimise their application capital.
“It is more important than ever for leaders to embrace infrastructures, cutting-edge application development methodologies and management tools, as well as processes and tools that balance effective controls with the freedom to innovate at pace. This is critical at a time where much of the user experience is digital in nature, delivered via the cloud, and increasingly built by developer teams outside of the traditional IT organisation.”
Some of F5’s further developments include:
Multi-cloud application services: According to F5’s recently published State of Application Services report, almost 9 in 10 businesses surveyed globally have multi-cloud architectures in place, largely driven by application-first methodologies. The biggest cited challenge is to enforce consistent security and ensure reliable performance.
Nearly half of all organisations (48%) undergoing a digital transformation initiative reported difficulties of this nature when applications are distributed across multiple cloud platforms. F5 will work with developers to be more productive and enable a consistent set of application services that can be applied to any app, anywhere.
Updated Kubernetes Ingress Controller from NGINX: F5 is currently the industry leader in application services, as well as application infrastructure for network and security teams. NGINX is the industry leader in application infrastructure for developer and DevOps teams, built on its open source core. Last month NGINX became the most used web server in the world, according to Netcraft’s Web Server Survey.
F5 and NGINX will serve NetOps and DevOps customers with enterprise-grade services for both traditional and modern applications – wherever built or deployed. Key to the acquisition’s success is F5’s ongoing commitment to open source, which is a core part of its overall multi-cloud strategy and a driver for the company’s next phase of development.
NGINX announces Kubernetes Ingress Controller v.1.5: This introduces new configuration to support features like traffic splitting and content-based routing, improved Prometheus support, wildcard certificate support, ExternalNames support, and Helm Chart availability via the Helm Chart repository. NGINX and F5 combine to provide 79% of deployments, according to a 2018 CNCF survey.
Cloud Services: F5 undertakes cloud-native application services portfolio expansion. Delivering optimised services for application developers and DevOps teams, F5 Cloud Services aims to provide high-availability, self-service, and fully managed SaaS solutions that are provisioned and configured within minutes.
F5 Cloud Services are designed to support deployment scenarios such as cloud-native applications, microservices, and container-based environments. Consumed as a utility through a pay-as-you-go model in the AWS Marketplace, F5 Cloud Services offers predictable pricing, flexibility, and the ability to auto-scale to meet application workload demands.
Aspen Mesh. A fully supported service mesh built on Istio. While container orchestration tools like Kubernetes have solved microservice build and deploy issues, many runtime challenges remain unsolved. Aspen Mesh addresses this challenge by making it easy to manage the complexity of microservice architectures.
Aspen Mesh is one of the first projects to come out of F5 Networks’ recently launched corporate incubation program aimed at developing enhanced solutions to better support modern application services, regardless of the underlying infrastructure.
