F5 continues to drive application and security innovation with Hewlett Packard Enterprise for Microsoft Azure Stack

F5 collaboration drives deeper integration for greater application services, development and security across Microsoft Azure Stack environments

Last September, F5 Networks, Inc. announced a collaboration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to deliver expanded application services and security for HPE ProLiant for Microsoft Azure Stack for enhanced scalability and security. At Microsoft Ignite that month, F5 and HPE led in-booth discussions and demonstrations of how F5 application services and security help enable more scalable and secure on-premises clouds with HPE ProLiant for Microsoft Azure Stack. Since then, we’ve extended the integration to enable more agility for customer application environments that use Azure Stack.

To drive greater agility and security for virtualized infrastructure, F5 has been working to improve the BIG-IP Virtual Edition (VE) instantiation into public and private cloud environments. Focus was put on reducing image size and start-up time for BIG-IP VE’s. With the general availability of BIG-IP TMOS 14.1, the instantiation time for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) has been reduced by 58% to approximately 3 minutes. For F5 Advanced WAF, boot-up time has been reduced by 60% to 4.5 minutes.

Additionally, to further enhance the customer experience in installing BIG-IP VE’s into Azure Stack, F5 engineers have built a native Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template. The F5 ARM template for Azure Stack, in experimental form up on the F5 section of GitHub, enables automated instantiation of the BIG-IP VE into Azure Stack.

HPE has also been working to increase business agility by introducing an all Flash configuration option for HPE ProLiant for Microsoft Azure Stack that delivers low latency and higher performance for developing and operating enterprise applications. In addition, HPE and Microsoft recently announced their support for 16-node scaling to allow customers to confidently build larger Azure Stack deployments to handle additional business applications and data requirements. The enhancements to HPE ProLiant for Microsoft Azure Stack enable enterprise customers to build fast, flexible on-premises clouds that can meet the need for speed in rapidly evolving business segments.

For many customers, Azure Stack is a platform that also serves for developing new applications for both hybrid and public clouds. Azure Stack empowers them to build, test and deploy new applications based on container technology. To help drive the development of container-based applications, Aspen Mesh provides an enterprise-ready distribution of Istio. Aspen Mesh – an innovation from F5 – includes all the capabilities of Istio and adds:

• Advanced policy and configuration options
• Analytics and alerting
• Multi-cluster/multi-cloud capabilities
• An intuitive UI
• A fully hosted SaaS platform

Aspen Mesh provides critical enterprise features in a platform built on top of Istio, so organizations enjoy the benefits of an open source approach without forgoing the features, support by service mesh experts, and guarantees needed to power enterprise applications. Coupled with F5 BIG-IP VE’s ‘North-South’ application services, development teams have scalable, reliable, secure application infrastructure to drive digital transformation.

F5 and HPE are focused on the design and deployment of an on-premises cloud on Azure Stack that provides customers the scalability, performance and reliability with maximum operational flexibility for existing and net new applications.

To find out more about how F5 and HPE are building a more scalable, secure private Azure Stack clouds, check out these additional resources:

• F5 Azure Stack ARM templates on GitHub
• Aspen Mesh – Management for container-based applications
• HPE ProLiant for Microsoft Azure Stack