Container Automation Drives Frictionless App Services

With the focus on DevOps becoming a greater part of the infrastructure discussion, we see various best practices on incorporating containers and microservices into app development and DevOps processes. Though DevOps and IT professionals still struggle to implement an infrastructure that supports the modern app development lifecycle. In the latest 2018 Quali DevOps and Cloud Survey of 1300 respondents, “nearly 50 percent must wait up to a month for infrastructure access, while 24 percent wait for more than a month, particularly those with distributed teams.”

On the positive side, automation implementation has made it to the main stage with the Quali survey showing “two-thirds of respondents (67 percent) reported implementing some forms of automation to improve productivity and agility....and of those already using automation, 33 percent have self-service capabilities for their R&D and dev/test initiatives.” Automation is key for those NetOps teams learning to become Super-NetOps professionals who support and drive continuous improvement and deployment practices. App developers need automation to scale new deployments and keep up with the demands of business requirements. An integrated self-service and automation solution supported by NetOps and empowering AppDev to achieve their goals at speed is required to align with DevOps practices.

One of the ways app developers are able to simplify their dev and test is to incorporate containers and microservices for maximum efficiency and portability. In addition, Ingress control integrates with the container orchestration environment, directs traffic to best available app, and enables consistent availability whether in development or production. Ingress can refer to HTTP Routing or a collection of rules to reach the cluster services and ingress (lower case “i”) also refers to inbound connections, app load balancing, and security services. The key is to reduce issues that slows down app development and deployment by providing self-service and automation based on container events.

That’s where F5 dynamic application services for container environments delivers frictionless app scale with Ingress control and app security services. Many IT infrastructure professionals choose container orchestration integration and front door app services from F5 by selecting BIG-IP and Container Connector, a solution that manages Ingress control services including  HTTP and URI routing, load-balancing, and application services in container and Platform as a Service (PaaS) deployments.

F5 deploys into PaaS frameworks such as RedHat OpenShift and Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and container environments such as Kubernetes and Mesos/Marathon. F5 Container Connector is an open-source solution and provides self-service selection in the container UI or delivers automation of app services based on container event discovery for rapid spin up spin down. Container Connector delivers greater flexibility and usability with pre-existing policies and profiles for OpenShift Routes, and annotations to rewrite target URLs for Kubernetes Ingress. F5 allows you to achieve visibility, and observability of all container traffic and delivers enhanced app insights through data-stream export to monitoring and analytics platforms. Learn more today at f5.com, read the technical information on clouddocs.f5.com, and download F5 Container Connector today.