It is All About the Application

We live in an ADHD world. Lately, everything we do is interrupt driven. When my pocket buzzes, I check my phone to read the latest message. Or, I may access my social media applications to see my friends’ updates and send a quick response, making their smart devices buzz and beep. Smartphones along with global availability and accessibility have created an environment where we are continuously reacting and responding to the latest stimulus. People are constantly looking for new applications to allow them to access correctly formatted information while adding their relevant input, in real time.

This creates a conundrum for the communications service providers (CSPs). They need to find ways to deliver new and continuously changing services to their subscribers. These services need to be built and inserted into the network architecture creating disruption. At the same time, they need a stable and manageable network infrastructure to reliably deliver these services. Lack of access to a service is just as bad as not having built it.

Leave No Application Behind

CSPs have been struggling with this lack of flexibility in their latest network models. They are implementing value-added services (VAS) to optimize their network performance, generate new revenue streams, and enhance customer quality of experience (QoE). At the same time, they are expanding and enhancing their 4G LTE networks. It is hard for them to add, remove, and modify services and functions within their static network architectures.

Lately, CSPs have been discussing software-defined networks (SDN) and more recently, network functions virtualization (NFV) to create a more flexible and dynamic infrastructure to deliver enhanced and evolving services. These technologies are designed virtualize or decouple services from the underlying infrastructure. While SDN is focused on the network infrastructure, the layer 2-4 aspects of the architecture, NFV is poised to virtualize LTE services such as the PGW, MME, or x-CSCF and functions like firewall, load balancing, and DPI through common off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and virtualized services that can reside on this hardware as a software-based solution.

Application Delivery Requires an Application-Aware Framework

F5 Synthesis™ is about enabling network architectures to deliver application services in today’s environment. F5 Synthesis is a new architectural vision for delivering a flexible high performance service framework. It provides elasticity and resiliency combined with intelligent services orchestration and a simplified business model produces an architecture to support today’s evolving network environments.

Application delivery has grown to encompass security, availability, identity verification and access control, cloud services, and performance management. F5 Synthesis depends on a high performance services fabric designed for the delivery of these context-aware services - F5® Software Defined Application Services™ (SDAS). SDAS leverages F5 technologies and innovations to deliver virtualization, abstraction, programmability, and orchestration of application delivery services for all applications.

 

SDAS enables a context-aware elastic environment creating an ecosystem where applications and the delivery of their services are no longer constrained by physical or geographical limitations. As long as the framework is in place, services can be scaled and enabled as needed to meet demand requirements over time, in real time.

It is All Coming Together

Orchestration of these services is essential to the enablement of SDAS as it relates to SDN and NFV. The continuous and reliable delivery of applications requires a programmable and automated intelligence to analyze and provision the ecosystem. F5 Synthesis delivers programmability to enable the integration of tools from F5 and other ecosystem partners such as cloud providers and orchestration engines through open APIs.

F5 Synthesis provides value in many aspects of the service provider model. F5 Synthesis facilitates increased service velocity, bringing applications and services to market quicker. Automation and orchestration is provided to enable services for any application. There is a lower operational risk through the standardization and simplification of the network and application delivery environment. Finally, the solution offers reduced operational and capital costs by leveraging COTS hardware and a unified ecosystem. F5 Synthesis is the next generation framework for next generation application delivery.