F5 Networks is set to highlight its burgeoning multi-cloud and DevOps-facing capabilities at this week’s Kubecon Europe in Barcelona.
The event represents the first time in EMEA F5, its service mesh arm Aspen Mesh, and the recently acquired NGINX present together at a major industry event.
“F5 is proud to be part of Kubecon Europe 2019 as we work with organisations to realise their digital transformation ambitions and truly optimise their application capital,” said Vincent Lavergne, RVP Systems Engineering, F5 Networks. “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.”
Key F5 news and developments in the Kubecon spotlight include:
· Multi-cloud application services. According to F5’s recently published State of Application Services report, almost nine out of ten 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 per cent) undergoing a digital transformation initiative reported difficulties of this nature when applications are distributed across multiple cloud platforms.
Kubecon will see F5 highlight how it is working with developers to be more productive and enable a consistent set of application services that can be applied to any app, anywhere.
Business increasingly need solutions that save developers time, reduce unnecessary complexity, and keep them focused on rapidly deploying the code they care about, and that the business values the most. As the leader in multi-cloud application services, F5 will emphasise how it helps businesses enhance their application capital by offering best-in-class application services off the shelf, as well as providing integrations with CI/CD toolchains and robust automation and orchestration solutions. Furthermore, F5 will demonstrate how it can simplify workflow around policy attachment and self-service tools, and how it can deliver actionable insights into the applications. In addition, F5 can improve enterprise security/risk posture by offering easy-to-attach security services, consistent policy management across applications (wherever they sit), as well as visibility and monitoring across entire application portfolios.
· Updated Kubernetes Ingress Controller from NGINX. Kubecon will be the first post-acquisition event attended by both F5 and 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 is a powerful combination that will serve NetOps and DevOps customers with enterprise-grade services for both traditional and modern applications – wherever they are built or deployed. Together, F5 and NGINX aim to bridge the divide from applications to infrastructure—and from developers to operations teams—for the first time. 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 an influential driver for the company’s next phase of innovation.
To that end, NGINX is announcing the latest version of its Kubernetes Ingress Controller. Version 1.5 introduces new configuration to support advanced 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. This support will bolster F5’s leadership as the most deployed Ingress controller, with NGINX and F5 combining to provide 79% of deployments, according to a 2018 CNCF survey.
· Cloud Services. Another development to be featured at Kubecon is F5’s recent cloud-native application services portfolio expansion. Delivering optimised, easy-to-consume services for application developers and DevOps teams, F5® Cloud Services aims to provide high-availability, self-service, and fully managed SaaS solutions that are easily provisioned and configured within minutes. As enterprise-grade offerings, F5 Cloud Services are designed to support modern 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 offer predictable pricing, flexibility, and the ability to auto-scale to meet application workload demands.
Crucially, offering F5 capabilities through a SaaS delivery model provides an extensible framework to deliver additional services as needed over time, and throughout an application’s development and production lifecycle. By introducing F5 Cloud Services to the market in a continuous fashion, F5 is prioritising a repeatable framework that delivers new SaaS offerings as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Secondary DNS Cloud Services are currently available in the AWS Marketplace, with a global server load balancing offer available in preview, and new security capabilities—including web application security protections designed to defend against existing and emerging application threats—coming soon.
· Aspen Mesh. F5’s Kubecon presence is further bolstered by the attendance of Aspen Mesh, its fully supported service mesh built on Istio. Businesses across the world are fast transitioning from monolithic to microservice architectures. 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. It also represents another step F5 is taking toward delivering an easily consumed portfolio of application services
“We have worked intensively in the past year to expand and enhance our offerings on multiple fronts, including new ways of consuming F5 technology that range from Open Source to SaaS. We’ve also evolved our capacity to facilitate integrations in CI/CD pipelines and pioneered a series of lightweight and modern app services solutions,” added Lavergne. “We are now in the best place we’ve ever been to help our customers execute on their digital transformation goals. Central to this is our unique ability to bring developer and operations teams closer together, empowering them with analytics, monitoring, and policy management solutions that can make a genuine strategic difference.”
Edited by Fundisiwe Maseko
Follow Fundisiwe Maseko on Twitter
Follow IT News Africa on Twitter
