Secure and optimize your containerized applications with advanced app services from F5

THE CHALLENGE: SUPPORTING PERFORMANT & SECURE CONTAINERIZED APPS 

Much of what makes containers so attractive—portability, scaling, increased development and deployment efficiency, etc.—can also be risk factors because they introduce more points of exposure. While there are some native services available within container platforms like Kubernetes and OpenShift, they lack critical features such as web application firewalls and protocol gateways that can protect you from hacks, bots, and data exfiltration that can put your customer data at risk.

You need a platform that understands the transient nature of events within the cluster and can provision application services appropriately in response.

HERE’S WHAT YOU CAN DO

With a microservices-based solution, you need security and networking solutions that are aligned with that highly dynamic and transient architecture. These application services should include enterprise-grade front door security and comprehensive end-to-end visibility. F5 makes it easy to integrate app services directly into the cluster management system, regardless of where it’s hosted, allowing the security and network teams to keep services up to date without slowing down development.

HOW F5 CAN HELP

F5 provides your organization with a powerful application services platform, Container Ingress Services, that integrates with your container management solution to deliver tighter application security and optimized performance of containerized applications.

F5 does this via two key components:

• Platform – F5’s powerful platform manages traffic, defends apps from attacks, and provides detailed telemetry for application and network teams. This is the front door to container apps, protecting and optimizing at the edge.
• Orchestration – Orchestration between the container management solution and the app services solution enables you to listen for events in the container cluster and automate configurations on the traffic management platform.

In the F5 Container Ingress Services architecture below, the container connector component (labelled CIS) listens for container management events, like new clusters or pods being created, and makes configuration changes on BIG-IP to manage traffic to new container resources. Meanwhile, BIG-IP, as well as protecting and accelerating application traffic, is supplying rich telemetry to management and visualizations services, which can then propagate changes in the container management system, closing the circle of observation to action.