BIG-IP for Scalable App Delivery & Security in Hybrid Environments

Scope:

As enterprises deploy multiple instances of the same applications across diverse infrastructure platforms such as VMware, OpenShift, Nutanix, and public cloud environments and across geographically distributed locations to support redundancy and facilitate seamless migration, they face increasing challenges in ensuring consistent performance, centralized security, and operational visibility. The complexity of managing distributed application traffic, enforcing uniform security policies, and maintaining high availability across hybrid environments introduces significant operational overhead and risk, hindering agility and scalability.

F5 BIG-IP Application Delivery and Security address this challenge by providing a unified, policy-driven approach to manage secure workloads across hybrid multi-cloud environments. It can be used to scale up application services on existing infrastructure or with new business models.

Introduction:

This article highlights how F5 BIG-IP deploys identical application workloads across multiple environments. This ensur high availability, seamless traffic management, and consistent performance. By supporting smooth workload transitions and zero-downtime deployments, F5 helps organizations maintain reliable, secure, and scalable applications. From a business perspective, it enhances operational agility, supports growing traffic demands, reduces risk during updates, and ultimately delivers a reliable, secure, and high-performance application experience that meets customer expectations and drives growth.

This use case covers a typical enterprise setup with the following environments:

VMware (On-Premises)
Nutanix (On-Premises)
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Red Hat OpenShift (OCP – On-Premises)

Architecture:

Figure 1: Architecture Overview for Scalable Workload Deployment Across Hybrid Environments Using BIG-IP

As illustrated in the diagram, when new application workloads are provisioned across environments such as AWS, Azure, GCP, VMware (on-prem), Nutanix (on-prem & VMware) , and OpenShift Container Platform (on-prem), BIG-IP ensures seamless integration with existing services.

Scalable Enterprise Workload Deployment Across Hybrid Environments

Enterprise applications are deployed smoothly across multiple environments to address diverse customer needs. With F5’s advanced Application Delivery and Security features, organizations can ensure consistent performance, high availability, and robust protection across all deployment platforms.

F5 provides a unified and secure application experience across cloud, on-premises, and virtualized environments.

Workload Distribution Across Environments

Workloads are distributed across the following environments:

VMware: App A & App B
OpenShift: App B
Nutanix: App B & App C

→ VMware: Add App C
→ OpenShift: Add App A & App C
→ Nutanix: Add App A

Applications being used:

A → Juice Shop (Vulnerable web app for security testing)
B → DVWA (Damn Vulnerable Web Application)
C → Mutillidae

Initial Infrastructure: 

VMware: App A & B, Nutanix: App B & C, OpenShift: App B.

VMware

In the VMware on-premises environment, Applications A and B are deployed and connected to two separate load balancers. This forms the existing infrastructure. These applications are actively serving user traffic with delivery and security managed by BIG-IP.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) is enabled, which will prevent any malicious threats.

The corresponding logs can be found under BIG-IP > Security > Event Logs

Note: This initial deployment infrastructure has also been implemented on Nutanix and GCP. For the full details, please consult the complete guide here

Adding additional workloads:

To demonstrate BIG-IP’s ability to support evolving enterprise demands, we will introduce new workloads across all environments. This will validate its seamless integration, consistent security enforcement, and support for continuous delivery across hybrid infrastructures.

VMware: Add App C, OpenShift: Add App A and C , Nutanix: Add App A

VMware:

Let us add additional application-3 (mutillidae) to the VMware on-premises environment.

Try to access the application through BIG-IP virtual server.

Apply the WAF policy to the newly created virtual server, then verify the same by simulating malicious attacks.

Conclusion:

This demonstration clearly illustrates that BIG-IP’s Application Delivery and Security capabilities offer a robust, scalable, and consistent solution across both multi-cloud and on-premises environments. By deploying BIG-IP across diverse platforms, organizations can achieve uniform application security, while maintaining reliable connectivity, strong encryption, and comprehensive protection for both modern and legacy workloads.

This unified approach allows businesses to seamlessly scale infrastructure and address evolving user demands without sacrificing performance, availability, or security. With BIG-IP, enterprises can confidently deliver applications with resilience and speed, while maintaining centralized control and policy enforcement across heterogeneous environments. Ultimately, BIG-IP empowers organizations to simplify operations, standardize security, and accelerate digital transformation across any environment.