F5 vs Open Source?

About a year and a half ago, the powers that be sent me on a similar mission as they looked at any licensing and other costs that they could reduce. One result of that larger effort is that someone sold the idea of going with mail hosted by a consumer focused company with a large advertising revenue stream.... But I digress.

 

 

Possible, YES. However there is the management and failover which I found to be the most troubling. Admittedly I am not 'nix admin so I do not know of all the tricks that they may have to bring to the table, but a simple concept like an HA pair of servers hosting NGinX had the smart Linux guys I know scratching their heads when I ran scenarios by them. As is the case with most things 'nix, all the configs are via files, so a simple syntax error will halt the entire process. Syncing the config files is also something that will require creative thinking too. Once you build out a FOSS stack, and it will be a stack of different solutions to get all of the features, good luck keeping the Rube Goldbergian system glued together and not ever fouled by a misconfiguration. To pull it off you would need many people on your team to support the solution who are 'nix, application, and networking GURUs, otherwise a novice without a full understanding of the system could mistakenly bring the whole house of cards down. There was a Long debate that Lori M sparked with some FOSS folks not too long ago where you can read their declarations of "Yes we can!" but the details of their solution made my head hurt. Oh and forget admin partitions where u let app owners take nodes one and offline, that is now your job. Also forget everything that is done well with the custom ASICs(SSL Termination & Compression come to mind) inherent with the HW ADC solutions.

 

 

 

An ADC solution built on FOSS is not a one stop shop and requires a high degree of expertise to make it all flow nicely. And with the huge chain of software needed, extensive unit testing would be needed before rolling sw updates to the various modules that would be needed to ensure no disruption of services. And at 2 AM when the solution crashes, which of the umpteen modules caused the crash, who can you get support from and get back online without loosing revenue? How tolerant will management be to wait for you to crawl twenty or so different forums for the modules involved and waiting on responses to posts to attempt to fix the issue?

 

 

 

Regards,

 

 

 

CarlB