F5 Now Available in Microsoft Azure

F5 is happy to announce the general availability of its BIG-IP Virtual Editions (VE) in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Now, customers who want to deploy applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters can take advantage of F5’s market-leading application services to make their applications faster, more available and secure.

Organizations have relied on F5’s suite of application services – including advanced local and global load balancing, app access control, DDoS protection, and web app security – for applications in their private data centers for nearly two decades. When they want to migrate applications or build new apps in the public cloud, their options for using similar advanced services has been limited. This has led to more costly and complex deployments across hybrid environments, despite the original goal of faster time to market, agility, and cost efficiency.

With F5 now available in Azure, as well as in a number of other cloud providers, you will be able to leverage existing IT investments, maintain consistency and control by reusing existing F5 configurations, custom traffic and security policies, and automated scripts across all your cloud providers and private data centers. And you can extend F5’s robust security solutions to your cloud environments to protect applications from web attacks and secure access to applications and their data. What’s more, you can enable secure and dynamic site-to-site connectivity between Azure cloud resources and your private data centers – with F5 among the only ADC solutions on the market to provide this capability.

F5 provides its BIG-IP VE version 12 offerings in Azure initially in a “Bring-Your-Own-License” (BYOL) model, which allows you to purchase BIG-IP VE Version Plus licenses and then port these licenses to Azure (or any supported cloud provider), all while maintaining F5 support. The bandwidth options for BIG-IP VE in Azure are 25M, 200M, and 1G instances. F5 will also add subscription and utility license models to optimize your usage based on your business needs and enable you to pay for what you need with no upfront costs. In addition, F5 provides three product bundles – Good, Better, and Best – that provide flexibility, simplicity, and great value in selecting among F5 solutions.

While Microsoft has certified F5 usage in Azure, Azure is also a participant in the F5 Ready program, which provides F5-driven verification testing to ensure the compatibility of BIG-IP VEs in cloud partner environments. As a result, you should have more confidence when deploying F5 in Azure.

So go ahead and get started using F5 in Azure today. Just request a free 30-day evaluation version or purchase a low-cost lab version and try it out in Azure.

For more information, I’ve listed a few available resources below. Or if you have any other questions on F5 BIG-IP solutions in Azure, contact us at AzureInfo@f5.com.

Additional Resources:

White Paper

Technical Demo

Technical Blog