BIG-IP Cloud Edition is Now Available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace

F5 Networks’ BIG-IP Cloud Edition – the marriage of enhanced, app-centric management, analytics, and orchestration tools (BIG-IQ) with dedicated and right-sized per-app virtual editions (VE) – is now available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, an online store providing applications and services for use on Azure. F5 Networks customers can now take advantage of the productive and trusted Azure cloud platform, with streamlined deployment and management.

Six months after the initial release of BIG-IP Cloud Edition, customer excitement continues to grow for the product, which offers:

• Simplified, app-centric visibility, analytics, and troubleshooting
• Enhanced management and control of applications, wherever they live
• Dedicated, easy-to-use, right-sized app services
• Increased autonomy for app owners through self-service deployments

Previously available for both AWS and VMware environments, F5 is excited to announce that it has extended support for BIG-IP Cloud Edition to also include Azure.

“With auto-scale now enabled on Microsoft Azure and available through the Azure Marketplace, we’ve unlocked the full value proposition of BIG-IP Cloud Edition within the world’s largest private and public cloud infrastructures. This furthers F5’s commitment to providing world-class application services for any application, anywhere.”

-Kara Sprague, Sr. VP ADC, F5 Networks

While a presence in Azure is nothing new for F5 – with our multi-app VEs and per-app VEs, supported in Azure and Azure Government – BIG-IP Cloud Edition is a recent addition to both. BIG-IQ, F5’s centralized management console, gives Azure customers another option to manage and gain visibility into per-app VEs, standard multi-app VEs, and hardware instances – all from a single pane of glass.

“We’re pleased to welcome BIG-IP Cloud Edition from F5 Networks to the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, which gives our partners great exposure to cloud customers around the globe. Azure Marketplace offers world-class quality experiences from global trusted partners with solutions tested to work seamlessly with Azure.”

-Sajan Parihar, Director, Microsoft Azure Platform at Microsoft Corp.

The missing piece was support for autoscaling the service scaling group (SSG), which spins up additional per-app VEs based on predefined threshold triggers. This is a key capability of BIG-IQ and BIG-IP Cloud Edition.

The release of BIG-IQ 6.1 – the management, analytics, and orchestration engine behind BIG-IP Cloud Edition – is the mechanism that makes it possible to autoscale the SSG of per-app VEs. With autoscaling (and, by extension, the solution as a whole) now supported, BIG-IP Cloud Edition gives Azure customers another option to tap into the benefits of cloud deployments while simultaneously fostering a more app-centric approach.

Got it… but what does Cloud Edition do for me and my Azure-deployed apps?

Cloud Edition:

• Simplifies and enhances troubleshooting and makes it easy to identify problems and solutions through application-level dashboarding, orchestration, and analytics
• Provides autoscaling that will spin up (and down) additional BIG-IP per-app VEs based on predefined event-trigger thresholds such as CPU, throughput, and memory use
• Limits blast radius and negative effects to other apps in production with a dedicated, per-app approach to application services
• Offers a lower TCO with smaller footprint, lighter weight, and the reduced spin-up time of per-app VEs
• Helps app owners, NetOps, and SecOps align to DevOps methodologies and gain more agility with self-service deployments
• Enables developers to take charge and provide apps in Azure dev and test environments with resources they need and then seamlessly push them to production with minimal changes

BIG-IP Cloud Edition’s support for Azure and its Azure Marketplace availability affords our customers another easy-to-buy, ready-to-use, cloud-based solution for delivering application availability, performance, visibility, and security.

Learn more:

• BIG-IP Cloud Edition in the Azure Marketplace
• BIG-IP Cloud Edition product page
• The Security Advantage of Per-App Architectures
• Making Sure Your App Party is Well Provisioned
• Get Started with BIG-IP Cloud Edition