Forum Discussion
satish_txt_2254
Cirrus
CirrusAWS ELB vs F5 SSL TPS calculation
We are running AWS ELB in cloud and now planning to bring it to our datacenter and it is going to be F5.
Now i need to understand ELB first to understand how much request we are processing and T...
Hannes_Rapp_162
Nacreous
NacreousHello,
Reference: https://www.f5.com/pdf/products/big-ip-platforms-datasheet.pdf
- Based on first observation, I'd say i5800
800K SSL TPS is a definite overkill. I assume your apps are HTTP1.1 that can re-use same TCP and SSL session for multiple L7 requests. Can you also paste "EstimatedALBNewConnectionCount"? Currently it's greyed out in your upper graph.
That lower graph shows you "L7 Requests per second" that you can refer to in hardware datasheet. Graph shows a peak of 800K but you definitely need more to cover peak activity months/hours of the year. You also need some room for growth and not spend dollars for hardware that you outgrow in 1 year. Assume 1.6M L7 requests your requirement when making a decision.
Hannes_Rapp_162Nacreous
NacreousSeems like you're all set then. 10200v will cover capacity needs for years to come.
Go with DNS/FQDN or raw IP?
With any short-lived connection applications, DNS name-resolution delay should not be taken as lightly as with your typical long-lived web frontend. In AWS, you have Route53 which should be replaced with similar enterprise DNS provider to not lose those valuable milliseconds. If you have any significant number of clients that are not isolated to a single state, go with a DNS service provider that has good global spread.
On the other hand, if you have a few major clients and no minor ones, don't even use DNS/FQDN name. Go solely with IP-port combo API calls for best outcome. When given a choice, a heavy client of your API would much prefer any performance gains over the benefit of using FQDN target in their API calls. Another flaw of using DNS is exposure to risk of service downtime due to DNS problems. The risk is minimal but a DNS provider can go down (i.e. to a DOS attack) and bring down your service with itself. This happened on a massive scale to Dyn DNS clients not too long ago.
BigIP configuration?
Let's look at this once you're past initial setup phase. There are a number of settings to consider, most notably TCP profile, HTTP compression profile, cache (Web Acceleration) profile. Depending on how much response payload there is, and how dynamic it is, we can determine best settings to use. To figure out best configuration, I normally start with default configuration that "just works", and then capture ~50 API calls and responses with full payload and headers to have a reference to work with.
Regards,