Managing Thousands of Apps

As enterprises move toward both public and private cloud models, they dramatically shorten the time for an internal application owner to receive new infrastructure they request.  Typical enterprises often see server deployment times move from weeks to just a few minutes.  This newfound agility enables developers to create and deploy applications at a rapid pace, resulting in an explosion of smaller, specialized applications.  These apps may be used by only a single department or a small team, but can number in the hundreds or thousands.

Today’s application developers also expect basic app services, like high availability, SSL/TLS security, and load balancing.  And they want deployment to be as simple as selecting options from a catalog with a few clicks.

So with the squeeze that many IT budgets are constantly undergoing, how can a centralized infrastructure team manage this explosion of network services?  Choosing a network service product family like F5 LineRate that is designed specifically to reduce operational costs can make a huge difference.  Let’s take a look at how LineRate can help.

Fully automated deployment via REST API

Integration of a new network service can be costly, especially if you need to separately deal with managing an operating system plus multiple packages from various vendors or open source projects.  Instead of learning and handling multiple different configuration models, choose a product that allows you to manage the entire system through a single API.  LineRate’s complete system-wide API allows you to fully automate every aspect of installation, deployment, and configuration, reducing integration complexity and time.

Monitoring APIs

With thousands of applications, integration into automated monitoring systems is a requirement.  And it’s just as important to monitor the operating system’s health and performance as it is to monitor each component of network services.  LineRate’s comprehensive monitoring APIs give you complete access to thousands of detailed monitoring points, including the performance of every configured object as well as the overall system and OS.  Access all this via either REST or SNMP for easy integration into your preferred monitoring system.

Fault monitoring, containment, and automatic recovery

Downtime is one of the most expensive operational costs for IT infrastructure.  How a product handles severe bugs can make the difference between a short blip in service or an extended downtime emergency.  LineRate Operating System (LROS) constantly performs internal monitoring.  When a fault is detected, the offending processes are automatically restarted in sub-millisecond time, resulting in little or no service disruption.  And with built-in HA, even catastrophic failures result in automatic sub-second failover to another system, meaning less downtime for your apps.

Consistently high quality

With network infrastructure, it’s not enough to know that a product has good quality today.  If the quality changes when you upgrade, that can result in costly downtime or performance degradation.  You need to know that there’s a rigorous, automated testing process ensuring that critical security vulnerability patches go through the same rigorous validation process without introducing new bugs or performance issues.  LineRate’s fully automated end-to-end system testing allows us to completely test a release in under a day and guarantees consistent quality in every software release we ship.

Support

Creating internal support teams that have depth of knowledge in every product in your network and application stack is a huge operational cost.  Partnering with a trusted vendor like F5 can provide dedicated 24x7 worldwide enterprise-class support, pro-active deployment consultation, and rapid response security vulnerability processes.  All of these lead to reduced costs due to unplanned downtime.

But don’t take my word for it.  Try out LineRate on your own and see for yourself how easy it is to deploy and manage.

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