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Application delivery has come a long way in the past three decades. As enterprise computing has evolved, organizations have been driven by the need for more—more apps, more infrastructure support, more availability, more flexibility. Yet all of this “more” has come at a price. As infrastructures continue to evolve to deliver the “more” that businesses demand, they've become enormously complex. This, in turn, has—introduced new risks, challenging the ability of organizations to operate at the speed to deliver innovative the digital experiences their customers demand.
As we enter the AI era, the supporting application infrastructure continues to grow in size and complexity such as the need grows to support AI-powered apps and develop AI factories. To achieve the critical services needed to secure and deploy these distributed applications, simplification is paramount.
In a nutshell, that’s what F5 delivers. Since F5’s formation nearly 30 years ago, we’ve been a market leader in application delivery controllers (ADCs). Over the years, we’ve continually reinvented ADCs to meet the needs of the underlying application infrastructure as it has evolved. And as AI once again shifts the underlying landscape, F5 has been innovating to meet the demands of the moment by simplifying the complex for our customers.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be exploring the evolution of ADCs to meet a changing infrastructure, application, and security landscape. This first-in-the-series blog post examines how ADCs have adapted to an evolving application infrastructure.
So, what has this evolution looked like over the past three decades?
Infrastructure 1.0: On-premises data centers of the 1990s
In the early days of enterprise computing, on-premises infrastructure was the norm. Businesses ran their applications, data, and systems on physical servers and hardware housed in a server room within their own building—serving users sitting at desks within these same corporate walls. These on-premises data centers required substantial hardware and software investments. They also required skilled IT teams to maintain these data centers, while administering security and software updates.
As application infrastructure has evolved from the data center to the cloud to today’s hybrid, multicloud environment, the ADC must reinvent itself to meet the demands of the moment.
These on-premises data centers offered complete control over data and systems. With infrastructure housed in a central location, securing applications was relatively straightforward, a benefit for companies facing strict compliance and security requirements. Yet building and maintaining data centers were expensive, and the ability to scale was limited. In addition, expanding to new geographical locations meant building new data centers, which was both costly and operationally complex.
The first application delivery controllers emerged during this era in the form of hardware or virtual appliances that helped IT teams manage their application delivery requirements such as load balancing. F5 quickly established itself as the market leader in hardware ADCs, eventually introducing the first on-demand ADC that redefined performance and scalability.
Infrastructure 2.0: Cloud disruption of the 2000s
The advent of cloud computing fundamentally altered the application infrastructure landscape. Computing resources were moved out of the four walls of the company into large server farms managed by third-party companies. Cloud service providers such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) began offering computing resources as a pay-as-you-go model—providing the flexibility to access computing resources on demand.
The cloud era brought tremendous benefits to organizations. It eliminated the need to set up new data centers that required purchasing expensive hardware and the cost of maintaining it, while making it possible to pay for the resources they actually used. It made it faster to deploy applications, while easily scaling up and down as computing needs fluctuated. And it provided access to a global network of data centers, helping companies expand their global reach.
The advent of cloud computing gave rise to the second era of ADCs, which moved from appliances to ADCs as a service—offering customers improved scalability, application security, and consistent policy management. Here, again, F5 continued its standing as the ADC market leader, meeting the needs of the cloud era by adapting our services to the public cloud.
Infrastructure 3.0: The hybrid and multicloud world of today
While it was once thought that a single cloud would dominate the future, that’s not what’s happened. Organizations are now distributing their applications and APIs across more environments than ever before.
Some are running their apps in multiple clouds to avoid vendor lock-in and optimize costs by leveraging the best services from different providers. Others are managing their apps across a hybrid landscape that combines on-premises data centers, multiple public clouds, and edge environments. In fact, F5 research shows that 88% of organizations are operating in hybrid deployment models, while more than one-third (38%) are operating apps deployed in six different models.
Hybrid, multicloud has become the new normal because of the tremendous flexibility it offers to choose the best environment for each application or workload. Yet it’s also created an unsustainable situation in terms of efficiency and security. As the AI era continues to expand, the underlying infrastructure will become even more distributed as AI workloads are deployed as close to the data that they require.
To meet these needs, the ADC must once again reinvent itself. ADC 3.0 requires a single-platform approach for application security and delivery—one that enables organizations to reap the flexibility of a hybrid, multicloud environment without getting bogged down by complexity.
It’s been said that simplicity is complexity resolved. By helping organizations to secure, deliver, and optimize every app and API across their hybrid and multicloud environments, ADC 3.0 promises to resolve the complex—providing the vital simplicity needed to thrive in the AI era.
To learn more, check out our blog post, “A New Generation of ADCs for the AI Era.” Also, be sure to check back for our next blog post in this series on ADC and the evolution of applications.
Continue the ADC 3.0 Blog discussion: From Monolithic to Distributed: The Impact of Evolving Applications on ADCs
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