Deploy consistent policies across any cloud

BIG-IP Virtual Editions bring the power, protection, and unparalleled flexibility of market-leading F5 application services to a range of private and public clouds.

Offering full traffic control, inspection, and telemetry, BIG-IP VE gives your virtualized applications the protection and optimization they need to deliver reliable performance, while defending them from an increasing set of threats and unwanted bot activity.

Learn more about BIG-IP Virtual Editions.

The BIG-IQ Centralized Management platform can manage many hundreds of virtual and physical BIG-IP platforms across multiple public and private cloud environments—as well as BIG-IPs deployed in on-premises data centers—all from a single pane of glass.

BIG-IQ also provides a service catalog of application delivery and security services that are maintained by experts but can be easily consumed by application teams on demand. In addition, BIG-IQ offers device, network, security, and application-level visibility and insights with personalized, role-based per-app dashboards. Finally, BIG-IQ can manage pools of recoverable, reusable licenses—allowing you to flex capacity across multiple clouds as needed.

See how it works in the deployment guide.

Learn more about BIG-IQ Centralized Management.

The network operations team is responsible for network infrastructure. In cloud environments, simple services like load balancing might be the domain of application owners; however, the networking team’s expertise in managing application traffic at scale and providing high-quality application performance and security services are as vital in the cloud as they are in the data center.

Security teams have the responsibility of protecting your apps, your customers, and your data from an increasing range of threats. While app teams have a huge role to play, the security team—together with their networking counterparts—and the application security services they provide are the first (and often the last) line of defense against a horde of bots and bad actors that would exploit vulnerabilities to harm your business.

These are the consumers of the NetOps- and SecOps-created application performance and security services. Whether the cloud has helped create the modern CI/CD deployment model of application development, or the methodology changes have helped create the cloud might be a subject of debate. Wherever you land on that question, it’s clear that CI/CD and other DevOps methodologies are here to stay—and the rest of the infrastructure needs to snap in to this application development and deployment methodology.

Protect your apps from the most common exploits—no matter where they are deployed—by building a library of standard security policies that can be deployed on demand.

For example, you can create an Advanced WAF baseline policy in a development and test environment, then export it to the BIG-IQ management platform where it can be referenced by an application template and deployed with the rest of the configuration—across multiple clouds. Even better, the policy can use the learning capability of all devices it’s deployed on and combine the data to improve the policy, which can then be pushed back out to the BIG-IP images running in the clouds. 

NetOps can assemble a catalog of services that combine security policies, application delivery policies, and logging configurations, and then assign them based on different criteria such as role.

Application templates can be created manually or cloned from existing configurations. Templates can even be stored in source code management systems and deployed by API. F5 continues to innovate within application services with our new Application Services 3 (AS3) templates that offer a programmatic, automated, declarative model for configuration of BIG-IP devices and app services. 

If you need a dedicated per-app architecture, then BIG-IP Cloud Edition offers a right-sized platform designed to give every app its own individual BIG-IP instance, combined with centralized management, deep application-centric analytics for easy troubleshooting, intelligent autoscaling, and flexible consumption models.

BIG-IP Cloud Edition >

You might need to deploy and onboard new instances dynamically—so there are cloud templates for all major clouds that enable API-driven platform deployment, and a reusable, declarative onboarding system to perform the initial configuration.

Cloud Solution Templates >

NetOps teams get information on network and platform performance, as well as key application insights, which enables them to become more valuable to their organizations.

Security teams can author and maintain tight control of security policies, monitor the rate of attack and attack vectors, and glean other key insights that help them keep applications and the infrastructure they run on safe from malicious actors and insider errors alike.

Application teams can monitor the apps they are responsible for in any virtualized environment—and get critical metrics like latency, round trip times, and page load times. These insights help them flag issues early, identify root causes accurately and quickly, and collaborate with SecOps and NetOps more effectively.