BIG-IP Cloud Edition: Fast, Simple to Manage, Generally Awesome

The top three operational challenges most IT departments face are cost, complexity, and ongoing arguments within the team over which Star Trek episode is the best. (It’s not “Angel One”, Rashid. It’s just not.)

Our new BIG-IP Cloud Edition can help you solve the first two problems—and improve the performance and security of your applications. In addition to slimming down BIG-IP and speeding up boot times, we worked closely with customers to build a solution that’s dramatically simpler to manage, provides visibility and analytics for easier troubleshooting, and addresses new and emerging operational challenges.

(Plus, if you deploy BIG-IP Cloud Edition, all the credibility you gain might give you the advantage in Star Trek-related debates.)

If your perception of BIG-IP is that it’s a pricey and complicated chunk of hardware…okay, we get why you might think that. BIG-IP is pretty complex. It’s also powerful, of course. That’s how we managed to stake out our position as the industry leader; but that power has traditionally come at a cost.

BIG-IP Cloud Edition represents something new from F5—a significant rethinking of how an ADC is deployed and managed. Standard practice today is to load up a single BIG-IP device with multiple applications from different lines of business. Under the traditional model, this offers significant cost savings and reduces management overhead—but it can limit flexibility and, in some cases, results in increased costs from overprovisioning. BIG-IP Cloud Edition makes it easy, and cost effective, to deploy and scale custom BIG-IP instances for individual applications.

With BIG-IP Cloud Edition, the BIG-IP admin creates a catalog of preapproved and/or required services for application teams to access on demand. The application team, in turn, can deploy applications with the appropriate L4-7 services on their own schedule. The BIG-IP admin team can limit the settings and configuration that the app team can change—offering a range of security profiles, but ensuring that basic application security is always enabled. They can limit certain configuration tasks—for example, with one app, the developer might only be allowed to bring pool members up or down.

The BIG-IP admin can also empower application teams to monitor the health and performance of their applications and take action to diagnose issues based on alerts. In the enhanced troubleshooting mode, an app owner can filter all 404 errors, determine which URLs are causing the error, then drill down on the pool members to see if one server is out of sync.

With BIG-IP Cloud Edition, the BIG-IP admin is a service provider to the applications team—not a ticket-taker scrambling to keep up with a growing flood of requests. And BIG-IP Cloud Edition ships with pre-built templates that, while fully customizable, provide a high level of application performance and security out of the box.

Layer 4-7 application services are hard to get right. BIG-IP solves hundreds of complex issues that application teams are, in general, unprepared to confront. When the app slows to a crawl, can’t scale to meet demand, or encounters security issues that good-enough open source security solutions can’t handle, the operations and security team are often called into help. BIG-IP Cloud Edition is designed to align operations, security, and applications teams so that each team has the tools and controls it needs for successful, sustainable application deployments. Along the way, it solves for problems most applications teams never realized they had—like scrubbing the 20 to 30% of the traffic generated by malicious bots before it drives up cloud bills, and corrupts business critical usage data.