F5 and Equinix are collaborating on a joint solution combining the benefits of F5 Distributed Cloud Services and F5 Distributed Cloud Customer Edge devices on the Equinix Network Edge Platform. This joint offering will significantly simplify deployment and offer secure applications and workloads across hybrid, multicloud environments. This partnership will be highlighted this week during Kunal Anand’s keynote, “F5’s Roadmap for Unlocking the AI-Powered Future” at our AppWorld 2025 conference in Las Vegas.
Distributed Cloud Services and Distributed Cloud Customer Edge devices will be available later this year directly from the Equinix Network Edge Marketplace, enabling customers to easily apply F5 services for security, control, visibility, management, and application delivery to applications and workloads across the Equinix digital infrastructure and global points of presence (PoPs).
F5 and Equinix have developed a joint offering that significantly simplifies deployment and offers secure applications and workloads across hybrid, multicloud environments.
The solution greatly simplifies the launch of Distributed Cloud Customer Edge networking devices from the Equinix Network Edge Portal to enable secure entry from the customer’s edge to the F5 Distributed Cloud network fabric. The device optimizes and secures application delivery and integrates with cloud and data center networks to provide advanced traffic management and security features, including network segmentation to secure and isolate application traffic.
Establishing business partner application exchanges
The joint solution addresses challenges that enterprises face when deploying applications at global scale in hybrid, multicloud environments, with the need to maintain comprehensive and consistent policy enforcement, manage sprawl, and segregate customer and partner traffic.
Applying Distributed Cloud Services and Distributed Cloud Customer Edge devices to the Equinix digital infrastructure allows customers to create business partner application exchange hubs that extend and expand the enterprise application environment through private connectivity. This enables enterprises to securely deliver applications to partners no matter where they are located, while maintaining corporate governance and a consistent, unified management experience.
Customers can also access private connectivity over Equinix Fabric, which allows organizations to connect their digital infrastructure seamlessly across the Equinix global platform. This provides direct, secure, and high-performance connections to a wide range of network, cloud, and IT service providers for optimized and reliable data exchange. It delivers private fabric connectivity across an enterprise's digital footprint, extending secure interconnectivity to remote environments and private partners.
“The F5 and Equinix partnership gives our customers the ability to easily, securely, and cost effectively extend their application footprint without having to have to stand up any infrastructure,” said Greg Coward, senior solution architect at F5. “They can deploy Distributed Cloud Customer Edge devices directly from Equinix and use these to effectively connect their cloud environments, data centers, and remote facilities such as call centers, with security and management control from Distributed Cloud Services.”
Applying Distributed Cloud Services directly from the Equinix Network Edge Platform Marketplace can also help improve an organization’s agility and cost controls. F5 services are delivered as SaaS, in a pay-as-you-go model that doesn’t require large infrastructure investments, and that can scale up and down as needs change. In addition, Distributed Cloud Services delivered from the Equinix marketplace are pre-certified to validate compatibility, security, and performance, requiring less testing and enabling faster implementation and improved compliance.
“Most companies have strict corporate governance policies with regard to security, and the moment you create an instance that deploys an operating system, security teams will need to do testing to verify that the app or service meets established criteria,” said Joe Kanagusuku, alliance manager at F5. “Whereas, if you're deploying the service natively from within the Equinix Edge marketplace, the operating system has already been deployed and meets established standards. Security teams can greatly reduce their cycles in terms of security hardening around the operating system, saving companies months of testing if they're deploying apps at scale."
"Distributed Cloud Customer Edge instance on the Equinix Network Edge provides a platform to enable rapid deployment of distributed applications and leverages Equinix's global footprint to ensure high performance and low latency to securely connect to private data centers and multiple public clouds," said Bala Ramachandran, director of product management at Equinix. "The Equinix Network Edge platform truly enables agile provisioning of Distributed Cloud edge services, thus alleviating the complexity typically involved in provisioning networking and security services in hybrid, multicloud environments."
Key benefits and use cases
Applying Distributed Cloud Services directly from the Equinix marketplace provides customers an integrated experience that delivers seamless and secure connectivity, addressing challenges that enterprises face when deploying and securing workloads across hybrid multicloud architectures.
Key benefits for customers include:
- Seamless global deployment with reduced cost and complexity: Significantly reduce operational burden by deploying virtual network instances on Equinix Network Edge in 32 major metros across the world, leveraging Equinix’s broad global footprint of 260+ data centers.
- Unified security and networking: Leverage Distributed Cloud Services for consistent security and application delivery across distributed application environments.
- Integrated security services: Offers industry-leading security capabilities such as web application firewall (WAF), bot defense, Layer 7 distributed denial of service protection, API security, and behavioral security defenses, which can be applied quickly to applications and data.
- Increased security and compliance: Ensure scalability and regulatory compliance while managing access control and data governance.
As an example of how the F5 and Equinix partnership can benefit global businesses, a financial services organization with a large partner ecosystem can rely on the joint offering to simplify the delivery and security of its applications across highly distributed, heterogeneous environments. The joint offering helps ensure that the financial services organization delivers maximum uptime and security to customers without the technical complexities normally associated with provisioning network and security services that span multiple infrastructures and ecosystems. The system’s interconnectivity across distributed PoPs also helps meet data sovereignty compliance requirements for data processing and storage.
F5 and Equinix also protect AI inference workloads from attacks and data leakage, especially when large language models (LLMs) reside in locations separate from inference operations. Distributed Cloud Services on Equinix Network Edge enables high-speed, low latency connections to all data sources from the core, edge, and cloud, with secure interconnections to protect AI models from unwanted poisoning or leakage.
To learn more about the F5 and Equinix partnership, see the F5 and Equinix webpage.
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