Accelerate Your Initiatives: Secure & Scale Hybrid Cloud Apps on F5 BIG-IP & Distributed Cloud DNS

It's rare now to find an application that runs exclusively in one homogeneous environment. Users are now global, and enterprises must support applications that are always-on and available. These applications must also scale to meet demand while continuing to run efficiently, continuously delivering a positive user experience with minimal cost.

Introduction

In F5’s 2024 State of Application Strategy Report, Hybrid and Multicloud deployments are pervasive. With the need for flexibility and resilience, most businesses will deploy applications that span multiple clouds and use complex hybrid environments.

In the following solution, we walk through how an organization can expand and scale an application that has matured and now needs to be highly-available to internal users while also being accessible to external partners and customers at scale. Enterprises using different form-factors such as F5 BIG-IP TMOS and F5 Distributed Cloud can quickly right-size and scale legacy and modern applications that were originally only available in an on-prem datacenter.

Secure & Scale Applications

Let’s consider the following example. Bookinfo is an enterprise application running in an on-prem datacenter that only internal employees use. This application provides product information and details that the business’ users access from an on-site call center in another building on the campus. To secure the application and make it highly-available, the enterprise has deployed an F5 BIG-IP TMOS in front of each of endpoint

An endpoint is the combination of an IP, port, and service URL. In this scenario, our app has endpoints for the frontend product page and backend resources that only the product page pulls from.

Internal on-prem users access the app with internal DNS on BIG-IP TMOS. GSLB on the device sends another class of internal users, who aren’t on campus and access by VPN, to the public cloud frontend in AWS. The frontend that runs in AWS can scale with demand, allowing it to expand as needed to serve an influx of external users. Both internal users who are off-campus and external users will now always connect to the frontend in AWS through the F5 Global Network and Regional Edges with Distributed Cloud DNS and App Connect.

Enabling the frontend for the app in AWS, it now needs to pull data from backend services that still run on-prem. Expanding the frontend requires additional connectivity, and to do that we first deploy an F5 Distributed Cloud Customer Edge (CE) to the on-prem datacenter. The CE connects to the F5 Global Network and it extends Distributed Cloud Services, such as DNS and Service Discovery, WAF, API Security, DDoS, and Bot protection to apps running on BIG-IP. These protections not only secure the app but also help reduce unnecessary traffic to the on-prem datacenter.

With Distributed Cloud connecting the public cloud and on-prem datacenter, Service Discovery is configured on the CE on-prem. This makes a catalog of apps (virtual servers) on the BIG-IP available to Distributed Cloud App Connect. Using App Connect with managed DNS, Distributed Cloud automatically creates the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) for external users to access the app publicly, and it uses Service Discovery to make the backend services running on the BIG-IP available to the frontend in AWS.

Here are the virtual servers running on BIG-IP. Two of the virtual servers, “details” and “reviews,” need to be made available to the frontend in AWS while continuing to work for the frontend that’s on-prem.

To make the virtual servers on BIG-IP available as upstream servers in App Connect, all that’s needed is to click “Add HTTP Load Balancer” directly from the Discovered Services menu.

To make the details and reviews sevices that are on-prem available to the frontend product page in AWS, we advertise each of their virtual servers on BIG-IP to only the CE running in AWS. The menu below makes this possible with only a few clicks as service discovery eliminates the need to find the virtual IP and port for each virtual server. Because the CE in AWS runs within Kubernetes, the name of the new service being advertised is recognized by the frontend product page and is automatically handled by the CE.

This creates a split-DNS situation where an internal client can resolve and access both the internal on-prem and external AWS versions of the app. The subdomain “external.f5-cloud-demo.com” is now resolved by Distributed Cloud DNS, and “on-prem.f5-cloud-demo.com” is resolved by the BIG-IP. When combined with GSLB, internal users who aren’t on campus and use a VPN will be redirected to the external version of the app.

Demo

The following video explains this solution in greater detail, showing how to configure connectivity to each service the app uses, as well as how the app looks to internal and external users. (Note: it looks and works identically! Just the way it should be and with minimal time needed to configure it).

Key Takeaways

BIG-IP TMOS has long delivered best-in-class service with high-availability and scale to enterprise and complex applications. When integrated with Distributed Cloud, freely expand and migrate application services regardless of the deployment model (on-prem, cloud, and edge). This combination leverages cloud environments for extreme scale and global availability while freeing up resources on-prem that would be needed to scrub and sanitize traffic.

Conclusion

Using the BIG-IP platform with Distributed Cloud services addresses key challenges that enterprises face today: whether it's making internal apps available globally to workforces in multiple regions or scaling services without purchasing more fixed-cost on-prem resources.

F5 has the products to unlock your enterprise’s growth potential while keeping resources nimble. Check out the select resources below to explore more about the products and services featured in this solution.