Docusign delivers reliable contract management for 1 billion users

Docusign, based in San Francisco, CA, serves customers in 180 countries with electronic signatures and other digital contract management tools. As the company has grown, technology changes, such as cloud migrations, remain transparent to customers thanks to app availability and resilience, protected by F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM).

Business Challenge

When working with legal agreements and contracts, there’s little room for downtime, delays, or poor app performance. Speed, efficiency, security, and low cost are key values for Docusign customers, who need immediate and always-on access to their documents for a variety of legal and business objectives.

In addition, a company that serves customers around the globe—both subscribers and users of the free Docusign app—must deliver its services across diverse geographies with conflicting data security and sovereignty mandates. Governmental and other customers often require their own protected environments. Meanwhile, the legal and financial nature of many customer transactions makes Docusign a tempting and high-profile target for cyberattack.

“We want to make sure our products are highly available and reliable for our customers to use,” says James Wood, Lead Software Engineer at Docusign.

To accomplish those goals in the context of global operations, Docusign has recently modernized its app deployment away from on-premises hardware to hybrid and Microsoft Azure cloud hosting. Initially taking a “lift and shift” approach, the IT staff is now refactoring apps for growing use of Kubernetes and automating deployments with growing DevOps expertise.

Solutions

After a long history with F5 BIG-IP hardware, Docusign shifted to F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition (VE), which has greatly facilitated the company’s growth and expansion to the cloud.

Wood explains, “As our business matured, we needed to be able to do things like migrations, moving traffic between one data center to another, doing upgrades, all sorts of things enabled by good load balancing services, SSL offload, and the ability to manipulate our traffic.”

Use of the F5 Flex Consumption Program (FCP) empowered the company to grow and virtualize on demand, at its own pace. It now operates nearly 100 BIG-IP VE instances running BIG-IP LTM.

“BIG-IP LTM really is core to our business,” explains Wood. “The place the load balancer has in the environment really glues together the network and the application.” Heavy use of F5 iRules in application logic helps the Docusign team solve specific challenges, while F5 application telemetry feeds Docusign analytics solutions.

Results

Facilitate modernization and automation

“The mandate was to lift and shift our on-prem compute into the cloud,” Wood says. “F5 helped me understand the best ways to deploy F5 VE in the cloud and how best to automate those instances. They were crucial to helping us make that move in the time frame we were given.”

Use of the FCP and automated licensing has also helped Docusign’s infrastructure engineering team make the transition to automated configurations and deployments, since the company’s use of blue/green deployment models involves fluctuating pool members and connections. That can create challenges under fixed or perpetual licensing.

“We have partnered with F5 to automate our stack,” Wood explains. “To get from zero to a fully functioning device takes about 30 minutes, not counting lag time factors such as approvals, which is amazing. That has helped our upgrade cadence and our delivery time.”

Ensure seamless service to customers

The F5 platform’s role as a proxy in the network is a key benefit that helps Docusign keep applications available for customers without service disruption throughout significant backend changes.

“We rely heavily on the ability of F5 solutions to manipulate our traffic, not only to make our solutions possible, but also to help us migrate and change our business over time,” says Wood. “With F5, we can make upgrades and application maintenance all look seamless to the customer.”

Deliver fast time to value

Wood and other Docusign representatives emphasize the quick return on investment the company earns on its F5 solutions.

Rich Gocheco, Senior Manager of Systems Engineering for Docusign, says, “The three words I would use to summarize F5 benefits to Docusign would be ‘time to value,’ because the F5 solution bridges the gap between complex network demands and rapid deployment. We’re very pleased with the performance and the efficiency we get for our dollar.”

Gain support from a trusted partner

“One of the best things about working with F5 is you really do get a trusted partner,” adds Wood. “You have the ability to reach out and ask them for help. They get back to you so quickly. Their support system is excellent and easy to use. That sort of reliability really strengthens the relationship.”

He adds, “The people at F5 are legitimately interested in seeing me succeed, and that doesn’t necessarily mean buying something new. They see me as a person, not just as an engineer or a line on a spreadsheet. They see our business as something that they want to succeed, and they put in the legwork to make it happen.”

He concludes, “F5 is a trusted partner that gets you where you need to go.”