One of the (unsurprising to me) reasons some organizations are either keeping their feet firmly planted in the data center or returning after a stint in the cloud is the lack of robust services available for building out comparable architectures. That is, the services upon which enterprises rely in the data center simply aren’t available in the cloud. Not because vendors won’t supply them, they do, but because some of them have technical challenges that cannot be overcome. Security services suffer from this challenge most often, as many rely on promiscuous access to the lower levels of the network stack, layers two and three, primarily.
There are other reasons, too, why private cloud is growing as fast (in some cases faster) than the adoption of public cloud. Legacy applications often have app and data dependencies that make it technically – and financially – infeasible to move. They’ve put down roots, essentially, and ripping them up to replant them would almost certainly not be successful.
But organizations know that cloud, as an operating model, is the best way today to achieve the business agility and financial efficiency needed to succeed in an application world. Which is why we’re similarly seeing the rise of frameworks like OpenStack in the enterprise. In order to provide a comparable, cloud experience in the data center, it’s necessary to abstract infrastructure functions into software-provisionable services. OpenStack offers that capability, with everything from storage to compute to network to the app services (including security) that are critical to delivering applications of all kinds today.
That may be why, in our State of Application Delivery survey, we saw that the highest adoption of OpenStack was among those who self-identified as having roles in the network, infrastructure, and security.
It’s also why we (as in the corporate We) are all in with respect to OpenStack and supporting its (growing) community. So much so that we’re (again) going to be at OpenStack Summit (Austin) next week. And we’re not just going, we’re a Spotlight sponsor. Because we recognize it’s that important, and we believe in the underlying principles driving OpenStack.
That's why we're excited to be attending, and to announce the availability of the F5 OpenStack LBaaSv2. That's right, v2. With it, you can provision F5 load balancing services - including virtual IPs, pools, device service groups, and health monitoring – in an OpenStack cloud. You can check it out (literally, ha!) on github or here on DevCentral. Your choice.
If you’re attending the show, be sure to stop by our booth (B24). We’re close to the coffay and if you let us scan your badge, you can win a set of PowerBeats wireless headphones. The drawing is after the event, so no need to be present to win.
While you’re there you can enjoy a demo of our LBaaS plug-in and learn more about our latest Heat templates, which are also available right now on Github in case you want to get crazy with them.
- Basic LB Heat Template
- Deploys an iApp on an existing VE that configures a virtual server and pool with one member. The Heat stack also creates a server (the pool member) and a client to test that making a request to the newly created VIP succeeds.
- Cisco APIC Integration Template
- This Heat stack deploys an iApp from Hitesh Patel's github repository. It deploys his APIC integration iApp template with some default values.
- Prepare an F5 VE image to boot in OpenStack
- This template deploys a Linux image as a BIG-IP VE image onboarding server.
And finally, if you’re at the show you’ll want to stop by and hear my colleague, John Gruber, on Tuesday, April 26th at 2:45pm in the Marketplace Theater. He’s going to be talking about what happens when a dyed-in-the-wool proprietary company gets asked by its customers to be open. He’ll answer the question of how to marry a proprietary mechanism to an open architecture and discuss why 'open' is such a challenge for cloud networking.
It’s going to be an exciting week in Austin, and we really hope to see you there!
You can also follow along on the Twitters @f5networks to keep up on important happenings at the show (like when the free beer starts flowing for the booth crawl).
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