Global or Local – Where Your Application Delivery Solution Needs to Take You

The tools that allow us to keep a handle on this ever-evolving ball of application requirements need to be up to the task of actually making life easier for the teams who do it all. Streamlined and user-friendly app experiences bring increased customer satisfaction, increased brand loyalty and reputation, increased revenue, and decreased user churn. No one would argue against realizing these outcomes.

My colleague, Tom Atkins, wrote a piece on the history of BIG-IP and its future: BIG-IP Next. You should definitely read it because even though BIG-IP Next is the evolution of F5's BIG-IP software, modernized and optimized for the future of application delivery and security, it's based on the principles that BIG-IP users know and trust.

A quick dive into the key use cases for BIG-IP Next LTM, the local app delivery component of BIG-IP Next, highlights this paradigm shift.

Optimizing App Delivery and the Customer Experience: BIG-IP Next LTM carries forward the best of the load balancing and scaling capabilities that made the TMOS-based BIG-IP LTM the centerpiece of so many application delivery solutions. To enhance the impact these functions have on increasingly distributed app portfolios, BIG-IP Next LTM provides BIG-IP admins with enriched app health monitoring as well as low-impact upgrades, ensuring that applications stay online and perform at scale.

Maintaining High Application Availability: An application is only valuable if it's available to users. BIG-IP Next LTM allocates dedicated compute resources as requirements change, keeping applications resilient, performant, and ready when users need them. And, when deployed on a next-generation hardware system like F5's VELOS chassis, you can leverage multi-tenancy capabilities to deploy multiple instances of BIG-IP Next LTM side-by-side, building redundancy into an environment by default. We're also introducing within BIG-IP Next LTM the new Global Resiliency with BIG-IP Next DNS solution set. With this, customers who have BIG-IP Next LTM can apply a layer of global resiliency quickly and efficiently to their application from the moment that application is deployed with a solution that's one part global load balancing and one part high availability assurance, backed by F5's BIG-IP Next DNS technology. Organizations can realize the benefits of BIG-IP DNS's Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) solution without needing a unique BIG-IP Next module. They can add the solution, configure it, and connect their applications across deployment locations all with a few clicks and configurations within Central Manager.