What are ‘Critical App Services’ and why do you need them?

If you’re attending the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference in Las Vegas in October, be sure to stop by the booth 830 to chat. We’ll be there, ready to talk about your applications. Whether you are moving them to AWS, or creating new ones, then there is a good chance you are going to need some application delivery services.

So what are thee ‘Critical App Services’ and why do you need to take them into the cloud? I think it boils down to a few simple services:

• Security (including identity and access)
• Availability
• Performance

If anyone notices a similarity to the F5 ‘Secure, Fast, and Available’ tagline – well there is a reason that this one refuses to die, it sums up what we are about so well, that nothing so far has really replaced it.

But I digress (and that will be no surprise to anyone that has endured my ramblings before).  I’ve also given you enough time to think about my claims that you need these extra F5 services in your AWS infrastructure.  Surely AWS has  the  most undeniably rich service catalog in in the virtual troposphere?  Why would you need anything else? 

It’s about the domains of responsibility. AWS do an excellent job of maintaining the security and availability the infrastructure and services  they are responsible for.  The thing is the one thing they are not responsible for is your application. And when we look at the most likely cause of a security breach, or an end user performance issue, guess who is the most likely culprit? You’ve got it: your application.  It’s up to you to secure your app, and make it fast, oh and don’t forget to make sure it’s available.

So how do F5 application delivery services help? Well, for a start, everything we do is application focused, not infrastructure or service focused.  F5 services like access and identity – including identity federation  are there to ensure that access to your application is controlled in a robust and as sophisticated manner as you need. Want to do some extra checks on a user coming in from an anonimizing  proxy on a weekend? Sure, no problems.  Need to protect your applications from OWASP top 10 or more sophisticated application layer attacks?  Use our web application firewall service? App layer DDoS – ‘low and slow’ attacks? You get the picture.

Application performance too, is a critical service. Sure cloud services give you the ability to spend more on infrastructure as quickly as you need to manage spikes in demand, but they won’t help address performance issues that are derived from high latency networks or slow clients. Those are things that need addressing at the operating system and application layer – or by using services like TCP optimization, HTTP/2 gateways or image optimization.

Finally you need to keep your application available – and as numerous local outages (although probably no worse than any data center)  have shown us, that means having a multi-region or even multi-cloud presence. Managing that with F5 DNS services gives you complete control over where your users connect to – AWS, your data center or another provider.

So there you go – critical app services  - provided by F5 to keep your cloud based application secure, fast and available.