F5 and Google Simplify Application Delivery and Security Anywhere
The term "anywhere" sounds cool, but what does it actually mean? Is this just marketing spin, or is this for real? How easy is it for you to deploy, deliver, or secure applications "anywhere"?
Let's look at an example of a customer deploying applications "anywhere," and the challenges they faced. Take a large EV manufacturer. They were exploring how they could retrieve data from their electric vehicles currently on the road to create high-definition maps of road hazards, signs, and other items a driver may encounter. They needed to deploy edge compute capabilities in their network of EV charging stations to pull data from EVs while they charge. Those applications would need to pull data, analyze it locally, run extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes, and send a portion of that data back to their backend application in the cloud or one of their on-premises data centers. This needed to happen for every EV, every time it visited one of their charging stations.
This presented a huge application delivery and security challenge. The EV manufacturer needed to build and deploy applications for each station. Unfortunately, the development environments and charging stations were completely isolated from one another. Delivering an application to each charging station the traditional way would require them to:
- Create an underlay network between charging stations to connect to their data centers or the cloud.
- Deploy multiple point appliances to enable LAN or WAN on each charging station.
- Manage network routing to ensure routes are shared among the cloud, their data centers, and charging stations.
- Deploy load balancers at each location to manage traffic.
- configure basic network security at each charging station individually to ensure the stations and the connections back to the cloud and their data centers were protected.
Defining “anywhere”
Doing this for even a few locations would take months, without factoring in the application-layer security needed at each location! Plus, any update made to the applications, or to the network, application delivery, or application security policies required a person to visit each location independently to install those updates. As you can see, "anywhere" quickly became too big to handle.
These use cases appear across a variety of industries:
- Healthcare providers deploying applications locally in their clinics and connecting them to backend apps in two different public clouds.
- Telcos deploying applications in their retail stores and securing app-to-app connectivity with backend applications in their data centers.
- Banks deploying AI inference applications in their branch locations for better customer experience and securing app-to-app connectivity with backend applications in their public cloud instances.
The challenges of "anywhere" fall into four different categories:
- Deploying applications in multiple clouds, data centers, and edge sites.
- Delivering and connecting those applications across every site.
- Securing applications on every site.
- Operating in a distributed environment, across network and application layers.
Making “anywhere” real
To solve these challenges with traditional methods would require huge investments in time, people, hardware, and ongoing maintenance. You would need multiple products and point solutions stitched together in order to make it work, but the risk of it falling apart would be huge.
Now, with F5 and Google Distributed Cloud, there is a true solution that enables:
- Application deployment: With the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform on Google Distributed Cloud connected nodes, you have a way to easily deploy applications to any connected Google Distributed Cloud node through a centralized interface, creating a unified application deployment platform. F5 Distributed Cloud Services, a component of the Application Delivery and Security Platform, ensures that application deployment is consistent throughout the Google Distributed Cloud network, speeding up time to value.
- Application delivery: Deploying an F5 Distributed Cloud Customer Edge (CE) on Google Distributed Cloud connected nodes provides an integrated network and security stack from layer 3 to layer 7, which eliminates the need for you to cobble together multiple disparate appliances each with their own management, configuration, and operational models. This creates an application fabric overlay across multiple sites without needing to build out a traditional network. Coupled with F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect, you can use Google Distributed Cloud to deliver applications from any node with consistent network and delivery policies. Distributed Cloud App Connect is built on a proxy-based architecture that enables you to have granular control over which applications and APIs get delivered to which nodes, and the specific methods for them to be delivered.
- Application security: By extending the Application Delivery and Security Platform to the nodes of choice, you have access to AI-enhanced security services like F5 Distributed Cloud API Security and F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense wherever Google Distributed Cloud is operating. These services are all managed through a single console, which can deploy the same security policies and services to any application running on Google Distributed Cloud. As the number of Google Distributed Cloud nodes increases, F5 can quickly and easily scale up to match new demand, and the centralized control plane ensures that you will always have consistent security for any of your deployments. If there are changes that need to be made to security policies, those changes can be made once and deployed to any Google Distributed Cloud node with a CE, making the security operations far simpler.
- Operations and management: With a centralized console in place to manage application security and delivery on any Google Distributed Cloud node, as well as any applications operating on the Google Cloud Platform, Google Distributed Cloud users have observability into every application's health and availability, and any potential threats targeting those applications. Each Google Distributed Cloud node can be connected to one another using the Distributed Cloud Services overlay, and applications on Google Distributed Cloud nodes can securely call on other applications in any location without exposing traffic. Any new Google Distributed Cloud nodes or applications that migrate to a Google Distributed Cloud node can always have the same protection as your existing applications.
Bringing it all together
Let’s bring it back to our EV manufacturer. F5 and Google Distributed Cloud create an integrated solution to manage application deployment, delivery, security, and operations, accounting for all the challenges our EV manufacturer is contending with. All they need to do is build the application, and with F5 and Google Distributed Cloud working together, they can rest assured that the application is available and up-to-date anywhere. Are you ready to take the next step and see what "anywhere" can do for you?
If you’re at Google Cloud Next 2025 in Las Vegas, April 9-11, come visit the F5 team at Booth 2086 to learn more about our partnership with Google Distributed Cloud and how we can make “anywhere” a reality.
Contact us to learn how F5 and Google Distributed Cloud can help you.