Getting Hands on with F5 solutions for Multi-Cloud Networking and Distributed Workloads

With today's rapid adoption of multiple clouds by enterprises to solve challenges such as rapid delivery, high-availability, flexibility, cost-effectiveness and avoidance of vendor lock-in, new solutions are needed to provide connectivity across public clouds, private clouds and on-premise data centers. Multi-Cloud Networking (MCN) solutions are now available to address these requirements, however they are largely focused on Layer 3 of the OSI Model, providing a logical, secure, software-defined network.

F5 believes that it is necessary to deliver the capabilities of this MCN approach - and go further and provide a truly scalable application fabric that extends networking and security capabilities up to and including the Application Layer 7. This allows for multi-layer security, improved observability, analytics, and multi-tenancy and self-serve not just for NetOps, but also for developers, DevOps and SecOps teams. One of the challenges of MCN is the difficulty of building and maintaining a consistent and standard networking approach across different clouds. We see the opportunity to solve this by shifting towards a Distributed Cloud model, discussed by F5 CTO Geng Lin in a recent blog.

To help developers explore how to start experiencing and embracing this new Distributed Cloud model, F5 has created a series of Guided Walkthroughs leveraging Volterra’s capabilities to demonstrate two important uses cases:

1. Connecting Kubernetes (K8S) clusters across clouds
2. Supporting globally distributed application workloads. 

The Scenario covered by Walkthroughs is an e-Commerce sample application (provided) for which the developer is looking to improve the front-end application experience by implementing a globally distributed Find-a-Store service. The Guide covers how to securely connect between Kubernetes deployments and also distribute app services globally to improve performance. Everything you need is provided: the application, automation scripts, etc. - just bring your cloud provider account.

The walkthroughs for starting with AWS, Azure or GCP, available at the links below:

·      Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

·      Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

·      Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)