For years, Red Hat and F5 have worked together to build a strong partnership, and today we’re excited to announce the next step in our journey to help our customers address multicloud complexity. Coinciding with our AppWorld event in Dubai, we’re proud to announce that Red Hat has chosen F5 Distributed Cloud Services to help joint customers simplify application security, application delivery, and network connectivity for multicloud OpenShift deployments.
Red Hat OpenShift is a unified platform to build, modernize, and deploy containerized applications at scale. As organizations leverage OpenShift solutions on-premises and in the cloud via Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO), and cloud-native solutions like AWS EKS to deploy apps based on varying needs, IT teams are faced with the daunting task of ensuring consistent application security, delivery, and connectivity across all these environments while also offering app mobility between AWS EKS and OpenShift environments.
From Blake Shiver, the VP of Global Cloud Partnerships at Red Hat: “F5 Distributed Cloud Services bring a suite of application security, delivery, connectivity, and observability services along with their global network of PoPs to address Red Hat customers’ multicloud application delivery challenges. With F5 Distributed Cloud Services, organizations can innovate on any OpenShift environment on-premises, ROSA, or ARO with seamless application security consistency, app mobility and app connectivity.”
Historically, to fully take advantage of ROSA, organizations still needed to go through the process of provisioning network connectivity between environments, establishing app-to-app connectivity for services across clouds, and deploying security policies using disparate point solutions—some of which are cloud-specific. This was required for every app, legacy or modernized, in every cloud, which compounded complexity for NetOps, SecOps and DevOps teams.
Today’s organizations need a multicloud app security and connectivity solution that can bridge the gap from on-premises to the cloud to enable a ‘build once, deploy anywhere’ strategy that can accelerate time to market and take advantage of the scalability offered by ROSA, while seamlessly enabling app mobility and connectivity into cloud-native solutions like EKS deployments to lower overall TCO.
This is where F5 Distributed Cloud Services can help.
Consistent security, connectivity, and delivery on ROSA with F5 Distributed Cloud Services
With F5 Distributed Cloud Services, customers can minimize many of the long-standing deployment challenges they encounter when deploying Red Hat OpenShift on-premises and in public cloud environments. F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect enables seamless, hybrid connectivity between OpenShift clusters that are deployed on-premises and in ROSA, eliminating the need to build custom routing, VPNs, or NATs to connect these clusters.
Distributed Cloud App Connect apps running on OpenShift clusters seamlessly connect at layer 7, leveraging an app delivery fabric that extends into any environment. This secure service connectivity model minimizes lateral movement and eliminates the complexity of extending layer 3 network connectivity from on-premises to the cloud—with zero routing changes, firewall port adjustments, or NAT or VPN connectivity required. Additionally, organizations can enforce consistent security policies across every service running in any OpenShift cluster, ensuring every app is protected. Networking and security policies are managed centrally and deployed globally to apps in every OpenShift cluster, saving time and making ongoing maintenance much simpler.
This is all enabled through the F5 Distributed Cloud Platform. F5 designed the platform to be hybrid in nature, providing a range of security and networking services to complement existing management tools. Organizations can choose to consume these services via SaaS or implement a hybrid SaaS solution utilizing a custom Customer Edge (CE) software package deployed in their environment. By deploying a CE package on-premises, ROSA Distributed Cloud App Connect is able to connect traffic between locations for high availability and service mobility, easing migrations, and delivering apps to users with a consistent app delivery and security operational model.
This local CE deployment enables Distributed Cloud App Connect to establish app-to-app connectivity between OpenShift clusters and to other Kubernetes distributions like EKS, delivering consistent policy enforcement and centralized observability across disparate cluster environments.
Shiver adds: “Combining ROSA with F5 Distributed Cloud Services minimizes the lift required for you to connect workloads between your OpenShift clusters. This allows you to free up resources for innovation projects like AI, rather than just focusing on maintaining core infrastructure.”
This approach minimizes the pains that organizations face when deploying new applications, simplifying network and security orchestration. Organizations can now scale more rapidly than ever, all enabled through the enhanced partnership between F5 and Red Hat.
Conclusion
F5 and Red Hat’s collaboration offers a powerful means for organizations looking to simplify operational complexity and modernize their applications. By combining the container platform and deployment capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift with the consistent security and connectivity of F5 Distributed Cloud Services, organizations can connect, secure, and scale their OpenShift applications as needed on ROSA without any service interruptions.
Get started with F5 Distributed Cloud Services today: https://www.f5.com/cloud
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