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How to Navigate and Optimize Modern Application Delivery

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, availability of applications has become increasingly complex and multifaceted. Companies must navigate a dynamic environment where traditional app delivery models are giving way to more sophisticated and distributed architectures. This shift demands enhanced performance, scalability, security, and compliance, which introduces significant operational challenges.

Without the right solutions in place, organizations face inefficiencies, security vulnerabilities, compliance risks and service outages. Effective load balancing from hardware level to layer 7, scalable architectures, enhanced security measures, and robust compliance tools are crucial to managing this complexity and ensuring optimal performance and reliability.

The following app delivery scenarios illustrate how these challenges come to life across five different verticals; a public sector agency (on-premises), an e-commerce organization (multicloud), a large global bank (AI multimodal app), a healthcare organization (Kubernetes), and a manufacturing company (edge computing). These scenarios highlight the importance of having the right solutions to address the unique requirements and complexities of each deployment model, driving engagement and achieving business objectives.

Public Sector agency using on-premises to ensure compliance

A public sector agency responsible for managing sensitive citizen data needs to deploy their application on-premises to ensure compliance with strict data privacy regulations such as SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 2700, DORA and CJIS.

Business Requirements:
  • Data Privacy and Compliance: Must comply with critical compliance requirements, ensuring that all citizen data is stored and processed on-premises.
  • Performance and Latency: Applications must handle high volumes of data with sub-10 millisecond latency for real-time processing.
  • Control and Customization: Full control over infrastructure, with the ability to customize security protocols and access controls.
  • Roll-based access control – granular role based access
  • Example Performance Numbers: The system must support up to 10,000 concurrent users with a negligible latency +/- 100 milliseconds response time.
App Delivery Guidance:
  • Implement strict access controls and data encryption to comply with regulations.
  • Utilize high-performance and high-availability network infrastructure to achieve sub-10 millisecond latency.
  • Regularly update security protocols and perform audits to maintain compliance.

A (non AI app) medium-sized e-commerce organization using multicloud environments to deploy an application

A medium e-commerce organization needs to deploy its shopping application across multiple cloud environments to optimize costs and ensure high availability during peak shopping seasons.

Business Requirements:
  • Cost Optimization: Use public cloud for dynamic scaling during peak times (e.g., Black Friday) and private cloud for regular operations to optimize costs.
  • Redundancy and Disaster Recovery: Ensure 99.999% uptime by delivering across multiple cloud providers with automatic failover.
  • Vendor Lock-In Avoidance: Utilize services from both AWS and Azure to prevent dependency on a single vendor.
  • Example Performance Numbers: Handle up to 10 million transactions per hour during peak times with less than 1 second response time.
App Delivery Guidance:
  • Develop a cost-optimization strategy by analyzing usage patterns and leveraging spot instances in public clouds during peak times.
  • Implement automated failover mechanisms and cross-cloud redundancy to ensure 99.999% uptime.
  • Use cloud-agnostic tools for delivery to avoid vendor lock-in.

A large global bank employs multimodal app delivery to handle data across cloud environments.

A leading global bank is deploying an innovative back-office application that leverages Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to handle text and image data across various cloud environments. This challenge offers opportunities to streamline operations, ensure regulatory compliance, and automate routine tasks. By reducing errors and freeing up human resources, the bank can focus on higher-value activities and enhance overall efficiency.

Business Requirements:
  • Scalability: Application must scale to process a significant number of documents, including loan applications, customer records, and compliance reports.
  • Data Localization: Ensure that sensitive documents are processed and stored in specific geographic locations to comply with regulations such as SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 2700, DORA and CCPA.
  • Document Processing: AI system must process and classify up to 50,000 documents per hour with 95% accuracy.
  • Real-Time Search and Retrieval: Enable real-time search and retrieval of documents with a response time of less than 100 milliseconds.
  • Compliance Monitoring: Automatically flag and route documents for compliance review within 30 seconds of submission.
App Delivery Guidance:
  • Ensure data localization by configuring cloud environments to process and store data in specific regions.
  • Use AI models optimized for both text and image data to improve accuracy.
  • Employ real-time monitoring and alerting systems to quickly address compliance issues.
  • Distribute workloads across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure to optimize resource usage and cost by optimizing resources.

A healthcare organization utilizing Kubernetes to deploy an application

A healthcare organization needs to deploy a patient management application using Kubernetes to manage microservices and ensure seamless updates and scalability.

Business Requirements:
  • Portability: Application must move seamlessly between development, testing, and production environments with minimal downtime.
  • Microservices Architecture: Manage 50+ microservices for different functionalities (e.g., patient records, appointment scheduling, billing).
  • Automation and Efficiency: Automate delivery and scaling to handle up to 10,000 concurrent users with zero downtime during updates.
  • Stability and high availability: Ensure 99.999% uptime with the ability to scale up or down within 3 minutes based on demand.
App Delivery Guidance:
  • Use Kubernetes-native tools for monitoring and managing microservices.
  • Implement continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to automate the deployment process.
  • Ensure healthcare data is encrypted both in transit and at rest to comply with HIPAA and other regulations.

A manufacturer utilizing IoT on the factory floor:

A manufacturing company needs to deploy an IoT application at the edge to monitor and control factory floor operations in real-time.

Business Requirements:
  • Low Latency: Application must process sensor data with sub-1 second latency to ensure timely decision-making.
  • Bandwidth Optimization: Process data locally to reduce the amount of data sent to central data centers, minimizing bandwidth usage.
  • Resilience: Ensure continuous operation even if connectivity to central data centers is lost, with local data storage and processing.
  • Example Performance Numbers: Process data from 10,000+ IoT sensors with 99.999% uptime and provide real-time analytics with a response time of less than 1 second.
App Delivery Guidance:
  • Deploy edge computing nodes close to IoT sensors to minimize latency.
  • Use robust data aggregation and processing techniques to handle large volumes of sensor data locally.
  • Implement fail-safe mechanisms to ensure continuous operation during network disruptions.

Learn how F5 can help with maximizing application delivery performance for these five different scenarios and beyond.