BIG-IP Cloud Edition is designed to enable easy to use and fast self-serve deployments of application services in private and public clouds. BIG-IP Cloud Edition is a solution composed of BIG-IP Per-App VEs and BIG-IQ CM 6.0. It's designed to deliver the same consistent industry leading intelligent traffic management (F5 Local Traffic Manager – LTM) and advanced web application firewall (Advanced WAF) services. For more information on BIG-IP Cloud Edition Components please read K3341282 on AskF5.
BIG-IP Cloud Edition is a solution composed of the BIG-IP Per-App Virtual Editions for app service auto-scaling plus BIG-IQ 6.0 per-app management and analytics capabilities.
What are the minimum versions needed for BIG-IP Cloud Edition?
The minimum versions required to support the full Cloud Edition solution is BIG-IP version 13.1.0.5 or later and BIG-IQ version 6.0.
What are the supported cloud evironments for BIG-IP Cloud Edition?
At release VMware and AWS environments will be supported. Support for Azure and other cloud providers is planned.
Can BIG-IP Cloud Edition be deployed into private or public cloud?
Yes, BIG-IP Cloud Edition can be deployed in the same clouds as BIG-IP VE, and managed as any BIG-IP normally would, but we are delivering lifecycle management functionality, e.g. spin-up/spin-down, autoscaling, and rolling upgrades using BIG-IQ for VMware vSphere and AWS cloud environments.
Can I upgrade existing BIG-IQ 5.x to 6.0?
Initially no, upgrades to 6.0 for existing BIG-IQ customers will be supported in 6.0.1 released later this year, along with support for BIG-IP 12.1.x versions. The intial release of BIG-IQ 6.0 will be limited to new installations of BIG-IQ.
Is the BIG-IP AVR module required for BIG-IQ analytics? Are BIG-IQ Data Collection Devices (DCDs) required for analytics?
Yes, AVR will be required to be provisioned on the BIG-IP’s utilized in the Cloud Edition use cases. Many of the advanced analytics use cases require AVR to collect more detailed HTTP layer, and performance stats to trigger autoscale. When setting up the Device Templates the admin will need to enable AVR. The AVR overhead on BIG-IP is lighter as all the processing/aggregation is done on BIG-IQ instead of BIG-IP. Data Collection Devices (DCDs) are required to receive the advanced analytics from BIG-IP and are available with a free license.
What is an App Template?
BIG-IQ 6.0 Application Templates are a way of standardizing application and security services deployment and policies required by an application in a service catalog as defined by the BIG-IP admin or domain expert. BIG-IQ 6.0 will include pre-defined templates for the common web application configurations. An App owner given the appropriate role-based access can then select a template that matches their desired deployment, fill out the required fields and then automatically deploy the application service for his/her application in the UI or can use published and documented APIs.
What is a Device Template?
BIG-IQ Device Templates are used to on-board BIG-IP Virtual Editions by enabling device instantiation, licensing, provisioning, and networking and are used along with application templates to support autoscaling. This allows complete automation of the environment, with no human involvement required to scale out VE services.
Where can I give general feedback on the BIG-IP Cloud Edition?
BIG-IP Per-App VE is a virtual edition designed and priced for dedicated per-app services, with licensed features for 1 VIP, 3 Virtual Servers, and support of LTM and Advanced WAF, and 2 throughput options, 25Mbps and 200Mbps.
What is the ‘1 virtual server, 3 virtual servers' limit?
Per-App VE is designed to support one application therefore it was licensed to support a single virtual IP address. However, within the 1 virtual IP address, administrators can also use 3 virtual server parameter different port numbers for the virtual IP. Within the allowed 3 virtual servers, one wild card virtual server is allowed primarily to support outbound traffic from backend servers.
BIG-IP Per App VE
BIG-IP VE (Standard
# of Applications Supported
1 Virtual IP & 3 Virtual Servers
Skys the Limit
BIG-IP Services Available
LTM
Advanced WAF
All Application Services
Throughput Per Instance
25Mbps, 200Mbps
25Mbps, 200Mbps, 1GB, 3GB, 5GB, 10GB, High Peformance
Is there a BIG-IP version requirement for Per-App VE?
Yes. Per App VE is available in BIG-IP version 13.1.0.2 but for full Cloud Edition functionality we require version 13.1.0.5 or later.
I hear there are smaller images for VE, are these only for the Per-App VE?
No, the smaller images are be available in the BIG-IP v13.1.0.2 and later releases and are not restricted to Per-App VE. F5 is reducing the disk size for all virtual editions.
Are there different images for the Per App VE and the standard BIG-IP VE?
No. The images are the same between the per-app VE and the standard VE. Software licensing determines Per App VE or standard BIG-IP VE functionality.
What is the relevance of single slot images and Per-App VE?
Slot = Boot Partition. Per-App VE increases the scale of deployments and cost savings on footprint becomes even more relevant. Per-App VE will be typically targeted for 'wipe/deploy' instead of in-place upgrades of BIG-IP. The 1 slot images provide further storage savings by removing the 2nd slot which has been used for version upgrades. 1 slot images are avilable for Per App VE and standard BIG-IP virtual editions.
With the new Single Slot VE images, how do we perform upgrades?
There is no capability to upgrade software to a new version or even a HF or point release as we now call them. Instead they need to be deployed in an environment that support wipe/deploy type workflows. Wipe/deploy basically means that a new instance with the new version of software is provisioned, and it will replace the older version VE either through automation, or some sort of auto-scale type workflow where traffic is directed from the older instance to the newer one.
Can I upgrade from Per-App VE to a standard VE by adding/changing the license?
Nope. You can license manage Per App VE along side standard virtual editions through BIG-IQ but they are not interchangeable.
This FAQ doesn't talk about High-Availability in the cloud from what I can see. For the per App VE, how would we achieve HA across Availability Zones in AWS, for example? Would we need to purchase two in that case?
The BIG-IQ is HA and if using VMWare, the tier 1 L4 traffic distribution is a BIG-IP HA pair (AWS uses ELB for tier 1). But the Per App VE is more of a stateless BIG-IP instance designed to pull full configuration from BIG-IQ as it's horizontally scaled out.
 
The service scaling group contains the requirements for auto-scale such as throughput, CPU, memory thresholds and will dynamically update the tier 1 traffic distribution of the new Per App VEs. In this case, a service scaling group would always start with 2 Per App VE's and maybe scale out to 4 or 5 depending on your requirements. Once the load normalized, it would then scale back to the original two Per App VEs.
 
Because it's dynamically creating BIG-IP's as needed, all redundancy is controlled by BIG-IQ's configurations and the tier 1 traffic distrubtion.
 
This is designed for those less-stateful applications that don't need the dedicated BIG-IP HA pairs deployed in the cloud (but BIG-IQ could manage both).
What are the other options apart from BIG IQ 6.0 to manage the Auto scaling in AWS if we want to use two active F5s at a time and scaling it by further two and so on?
You can create your service scaling group with 2 BIG-IPs initially and set the scaling rules to add additional BIG-IPs depending on crossing thresholds (CPU, Memory, throughput, ...).
@Roman: Thanks for sharing the links! Can we achieve this (Auto-scaling) without BIG-IQ? Any other way where we can manage the configuration without the use of Big-IQ?
The images are the same between the per-app VE and the standard VE. Software licensing determines Per App VE or standard BIG-IP VE functionality.
You can deploy manually a BIG-IP in Hyper-V and apply the per-app VE license.
If you are talking about Auto-Scaling, there are no plans to support Hyper-V at the moment. Service Scaling Groups are only supported in VMware, AWS and Azure at the moment.
