F5 NGINXaaS for Google Cloud: Delivering resilient, scalable applications

Applications that are late in moving to the cloud are likely mission-critical, laden with complexity and technical debt, or both. It can be difficult to create a smooth journey to the cloud and successfully replicate the application delivery success achieved on premises.

And the stakes are high when you start targeting mission-critical applications. Any app delivery disruption, whether it’s from inadequate infrastructure, traffic spikes, system downtime, or a cyber event, can have a big impact on the business. A recent ITIC survey shows the hourly cost of downtime exceeds $100,000 for 97% of enterprises, and costs anywhere from $1 million to over $5 million for 41% of enterprises.

Tooling from the cloud provider can cover several base requirements for straightforward applications, but mission-critical apps come with complicated infrastructure configurations and strict resiliency requirements, and often need more robust features, flexibility, and control—without adding complexity.

Enterprises can mirror their on-premises strategy and utilize an application delivery controller (ADC) in the cloud as a native service to tackle tricky or advanced requirements. This allows teams to avoid the toil of managing the ADC infrastructure and hardware or software which can include patching, life-cycle management, and security, as well as resourcing an increasingly scarce skill set to manage everything in the first place. As a cloud-native package, teams simply operate the service to get an inherently scalable ADC that responds dynamically to application needs.

F5 NGINXaaS for Google Cloud, a component of the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP), complements Google Cloud load balancer services and addresses more advanced requirements for availability and security. F5 NGINXaaS is cloud-native, so teams get the simplicity and reduced overhead of an ADCaaS as well as a seamless experience within Google Cloud.

Advanced features needed to deliver resilient, mission-critical applications in the cloud include intelligent load balancing, built-in, scalable security, and high degrees of programmability and automation.

As AI-driven workloads further reshape application delivery landscapes, these requirements become even more critical—demanding infrastructure that can handle high-throughput and dynamic environments with ease. Engineers and architects must also build for agility, security, and automation by designing flexible systems that support legacy systems, microservices, and AI workloads that can thrive in tomorrow’s cloud-native world.  

F5 NGINXaaS helps organizations meet these challenges by providing scalability, intelligent traffic management, and seamless integrations with the Google Cloud ecosystem—strengthening performance and resiliency for cloud and AI-powered applications.

Google Cloud load balancing is the first choice for global, high-scale traffic. F5 NGINXaaS for Google Cloud takes these capabilities further with load balancing for HTTP, TCP, and UDP traffic, support for numerous algorithms, and advanced traffic management features for resilient applications:

• Intelligent load-based traffic distribution (least time) ensures the fastest application response time possible and optimized resource utilization at scale.
• Dynamic reconfiguration, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and request buffering prevent connection timeouts and errors during peak workloads.

F5 NGINXaaS for Google Cloud’s strong security controls protect cloud-native applications and microservices from code to customer without adding complexity and overhead:

• The F5 solution can lock down access or specific portions of an application by tying into Google Cloud as an identity provider (IDP).
• The platform also controls user and service identities and their authorized access and actions with JSON Web Tokens (JWT), OpenID Connect (OIDC), and role-based access control (RBAC).