App Delivery & Security for Hybrid Environments using F5 Distributed Cloud
As enterprises modernize and expand their digital services, they increasingly deploy multiple instances of the same applications across diverse infrastructure environments—such as VMware, OpenShift, and Nutanix—to support distributed teams, regional data sovereignty, redundancy, or environment-specific compliance needs. These application instances often integrate into service chains that span across clouds and data centers, introducing both scale and operational complexity. F5 Distributed Cloud provides a unified solution for secure, consistent application delivery and security across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It enables organizations to add workloads seamlessly—whether for scaling, redundancy, or localization—without sacrificing visibility, security, or performance.BIG-IP for Scalable App Delivery & Security in Hybrid Environments
Scope: As enterprises deploy multiple instances of the same applications across diverse infrastructure platforms such as VMware, OpenShift, Nutanix, and public cloud environments and across geographically distributed locations to support redundancy and facilitate seamless migration, they face increasing challenges in ensuring consistent performance, centralized security, and operational visibility. The complexity of managing distributed application traffic, enforcing uniform security policies, and maintaining high availability across hybrid environments introduces significant operational overhead and risk, hindering agility and scalability. F5 BIG-IP Application Delivery and Security address this challenge by providing a unified, policy-driven approach to manage secure workloads across hybrid multi-cloud environments. It can be used to scale up application services on existing infrastructure or with new business models. Introduction: This article highlights how F5 BIG-IP deploys identical application workloads across multiple environments. This ensure high availability, seamless traffic management, and consistent performance. By supporting smooth workload transitions and zero-downtime deployments, F5 helps organizations maintain reliable, secure, and scalable applications. From a business perspective, it enhances operational agility, supports growing traffic demands, reduces risk during updates, and ultimately delivers a reliable, secure, and high-performance application experience that meets customer expectations and drives growth. This use case covers a typical enterprise setup with the following environments: VMware (On-Premises) Nutanix (On-Premises) OCP (On-Premises) Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Architecture: As illustrated in the diagram, when new application workloads are provisioned across environments such as AWS, GCP, VMware (on-prem), Nutanix (on-prem & VMware) BIG-IP ensures seamless integration with existing services. Platforms Supported Environments VMware On-Prem, GCP, Azure Nutanix On-Prem, AWS, Azure OCP On-Prem, AWS, Azure This article outlines the deployment in VMware platform. For deployment in other platforms like Nutanix and GCP, refer the detailed guide below. F5 Scalable Enterprise Workload Deployments Complete Guide Scalable Enterprise Workload Deployment Across Hybrid Environments Enterprise applications are deployed smoothly across multiple environments to address diverse customer needs. With F5’s advanced Application Delivery and Security features, organizations can ensure consistent performance, high availability, and robust protection across all deployment platforms. F5 provides a unified and secure application experience across cloud, on-premises, and virtualized environments. Workload Distribution Across Environments Workloads are distributed across the following environments: VMware: App A & App B OpenShift: App B Nutanix: App B & App C → VMware: Add App C → OpenShift: Add App A & App C → Nutanix: Add App A Applications being used: A → Juice Shop (Vulnerable web app for security testing) B → DVWA (Damn Vulnerable Web Application) C → Mutillidae Initial Infrastructure: & B, Nutanix: App B &C, GCP: App B. VMware: In the VMware on-premises environment, Applications A and B are deployed and connected to two separate load balancers. This forms the existing infrastructure. These applications are actively serving user traffic with delivery and security managed by BIG-IP. Web Application Firewall (WAF) is enabled, which will prevent any malicious threats. The corresponding logs can be found under BIG-IP > Security > Event Logs Note: This initial deployment infrastructure has also been implemented on Nutanix and GCP. For the full details, please consult the complete guide here Adding additional workloads: To demonstrate BIG-IP’s ability to support evolving enterprise demands, we will introduce new workloads across all environments. This will validate its seamless integration, consistent security enforcement, and support for continuous delivery across hybrid infrastructures. VMware: Let us add additional application-3 (mutillidae) to the VMware on-premises environment. Try to access the application through BIG-IP virtual server. Apply the WAF policy to the newly created virtual server, then verify the same by simulating malicious attacks. Nutanix: The use case described for VMware is equally applicable and supported when deploying BIG-IP on Nutanix Bare Metal as well as Nutanix on VMware. For demonstration purposes, the Nutanix Community Edition hypervisor is booted as a virtual machine within VMware. Inside this hypervisor, a new virtual machine is created and provisioned using the BIG-IP image downloaded from the F5 Downloads portal. Once the BIG-IP instance is online, an additional VM hosting the application workload is deployed. This application VM is then associated with a BIG-IP virtual server, ensuring that the application remains isolated and protected from direct external exposure. OCP: The use case described for VMware is equally applicable and fully supported when deploying BIG-IP with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) including Nutanix and VMware-based infrastructures. For demonstration, OCP is deployed on a virtualized cluster, while BIG-IP is provisioned externally using an image from the F5 Downloads portal. BIG-IP consumes the OpenShift configuration and dynamically creates the required virtual servers, pools, and health monitors. Traffic to the application is routed through BIG-IP, ensuring that the application remains isolated from direct external exposure while benefiting from enterprise-grade traffic management, security enforcement, and observability. GCP (Google Cloud Platform): The use case discussed above for VMware is also applicable and supported when deploying BIG-IP on public cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, and GCP. For demonstration purposes, GCP is selected as the cloud environment for deploying BIG-IP. Within the same project where the BIG-IP instance is provisioned, an additional virtual machine hosting application workloads is deployed and associated with the BIG-IP virtual server. This setup ensures that the application workloads remain protected behind BIG-IP, preventing direct external exposure. Key Resources: Please refer to the detailed guide below, which outlines the deployment of Nutanix on VMware and GCP, and demonstrates how BIG-IP delivers consistent security, traffic management, and application delivery across hybrid environments. F5 Scalable Enterprise Workload Deployments Complete Guide Conclusion: This demonstration clearly illustrates that BIG-IP’s Application Delivery and Security capabilities offer a robust, scalable, and consistent solution across both multi-cloud and on-premises environments. By deploying BIG-IP across diverse platforms, organizations can achieve uniform application security, while maintaining reliable connectivity, strong encryption, and comprehensive protection for both modern and legacy workloads. This unified approach allows businesses to seamlessly scale infrastructure and address evolving user demands without sacrificing performance, availability, or security. With BIG-IP, enterprises can confidently deliver applications with resilience and speed, while maintaining centralized control and policy enforcement across heterogeneous environments. Ultimately, BIG-IP empowers organizations to simplify operations, standardize security, and accelerate digital transformation across any environment. References: F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform BIG-IP Data Sheet F5 Hybrid Security Architectures: One WAF Engine, Total Flexibility Distributed Cloud (XC) Github Repo BIG-IP Github RepoDelivering Secure Application Services Anywhere with Nutanix Flow and F5 Distributed Cloud
Introduction F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) is the premier solution for converging high-performance delivery and security for every app and API across any environment. It provides a unified platform offering granular visibility, streamlined operations, and AI-driven insights — deployable anywhere and in any form factor. The F5 ADSP Partner Ecosystem brings together a broad range of partners to deliver customer value across the entire lifecycle. This includes cohesive solutions, cloud synergies, and access to expert services that help customers maximize outcomes while simplifying operations. In this article, we’ll explore the upcoming integration between Nutanix Flow and F5 Distributed Cloud, showcasing how F5 and Nutanix collaborate to deliver secure, resilient application services across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Integration Overview At the heart of this integration is the capability to deploy a F5 Distributed Cloud Customer Edge (CE) inside a Nutanix Flow VPC, establish BGP peering with the Nutanix Flow BGP Gateway, and inject CE-advertised BGP routes into the VPC routing table. This architecture provides us complete control over application delivery and security within the VPC. We can selectively advertise HTTP load balancers (LBs) or VIPs to designated VPCs, ensuring secure and efficient connectivity. Additionally, the integration securely simplifies network segmentation across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. By leveraging F5 Distributed Cloud to segment and extend the network to remote locations, combined with Nutanix Flow Security for microsegmentation within VPCs, we deliver comprehensive end-to-end network security. This approach enforces a consistent security posture while simplifying segmentation across environments. In this article, we’ll focus on application delivery and security, and explore segmentation in the next article. Demo Walkthrough Let’s walk through a demo to see how this integration works. The goal of this demo is to enable secure application delivery for nutanix5.f5-demo.com within the Nutanix Flow Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) named dev3. Our demo environment, dev3, is a Nutanix Flow VPC with a F5 Distributed Cloud Customer Edge (CE) named jy-nutanix-overlay-dev3 deployed inside: *Note: CE is named jy-nutanix-overlay-dev3 in the F5 Distributed Cloud Console and xc-ce-dev3 in the Nutanix Prism Central. eBGP peering is ESTABLISHED between the CE and the Nutanix Flow BGP Gateway: On the F5 Distributed Cloud Console, we created an HTTP Load Balancer named jy-nutanix-internal-5 serving the FQDN nutanix5.f5-demo.com. This load balancer distributes workloads across hybrid multicloud environments and is protected by a WAF policy named nutanix-demo: We advertised this HTTP Load Balancer with a Virtual IP (VIP) 10.10.111.175 to the CE jy-nutanix-overlay-dev3 deployed inside Nutanix Flow VPC dev3: The CE then advertised the VIP route to its peer via BGP – the Nutanix Flow BGP Gateway: The Nutanix Flow BGP Gateway received the VIP route and installed it in the VPC routing table: Finally, the VMs in dev3 can securely access nutanix5.f5-demo.com while continuing to use the VPC logical router as their default gateway: F5 Distributed Cloud Console observability provides deep visibility into applications and security events. For example, it offers comprehensive dashboards and metrics to monitor the performance and health of applications served through HTTP load balancers. These include detailed insights into traffic patterns, latency, HTTP error rates, and the status of backend services: Furthermore, the built-in AI assistant provides real-time visibility and actionable guidance on security incidents, improving situational awareness and supporting informed decision-making. This capability enables rapid threat detection and response, helping maintain a strong and resilient security posture: Conclusion The integration demonstrates how F5 Distributed Cloud and Nutanix Flow collaborate to deliver secure, resilient application services across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Together, F5 and Nutanix enable organizations to scale with confidence, optimize application performance, and maintain robust security—empowering businesses to achieve greater agility and resilience across any environment. This integration is coming soon in CY2026. If you’re interested in early access, please contact your F5 representative. Reference URLs https://www.f5.com/products/distributed-cloud-services https://www.nutanix.com/products/flow/networking
Using F5 NGINX Plus as the Ingress Controller within Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP)
Managing incoming traffic is a critical component of running applications efficiently within Kubernetes clusters. As organizations continue to deploy a growing number of microservices, the need for robust, flexible, and intelligent traffic management solutions becomes more apparent. In this article, we provide an overview of how F5 NGINX Plus, when used as the ingress controller in the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP), offers a comprehensive approach to traffic optimization, application reliability, and security.Secure and Seamless Cloud Application Migration with F5 Distributed Cloud and Nutanix
Introduction F5 Distributed Cloud (XC) offers SaaS-based security, networking, and application management services for multicloud environments, on-premises infrastructures, and edge locations. F5 Distributed Cloud Services Customer Edge (CE) enhances these capabilities by integrating into a customer’s environment, enabling centralized management via the F5 Distributed Cloud Console while being fully operated by the customer. F5 Distributed Cloud Services Customer Edge (CE) can be deployed in public clouds, on-premises, or at the edge. Nutanix is a leading provider of Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), which integrates storage, compute, networking, and virtualization into a unified, scalable, and easily managed solution. Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) extend on-premises data centers to public clouds, maintaining the simplicity of the Nutanix software stack with a unified management console. NC2 runs AOS and AHV on public cloud instances, offering the same CLI, user interface, and APIs as on-premises environments. This article explores how F5 Distributed Cloud and Nutanix collaborate to deliver secure and seamless application services across various types of cloud application migrations. Whether migrating applications to the cloud, repatriating them from public clouds, or transitioning into a hybrid multicloud environment, F5 Distributed Cloud and Nutanix ensure optimal performance and security at all times. Illustration F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect securely connect distributed application services across hybrid and multicloud environments. It operates seamlessly with a platform of web application and API protection (WAAP) services, safeguarding apps and APIs against a wide range of threats through robust security policies including an integrated WAF, DDoS protection, bot management, and other security tools. This enables the enforcement of consistent and comprehensive security policies across all applications without the need to configure individual custom policies for each app and environment. Additionally, it provides centralized observability by providing clear insights into performance metrics, security posture, and operational statuses across all cloud platforms. In this section, we illustrate how to utilize F5 Distributed App Connect with Nutanix for different cloud application migration scenarios. Cloud Migration In our example, we have a VMware environment within a data center located in San Jose. Our goal is to migrate the on-premises application nutanix.f5-demo.com from the VMware environment to a multicloud environment by distributing the application workloads across Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on AWS and Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Azure. First, we deploy F5 Distributed Cloud Customer Edge (CE) and application workloads on Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on AWS as well as Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Azure. F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect addresses the issue of IP overlapping, enabling us to deploy application workloads using the same IP addresses as those in the VMware environment in the San Jose data center. Next, we create origin pools on the F5 Distributed Cloud Console. In our example, we create two origin pools: nutanix-nc2-aws-pool for origin servers on NC2 on AWS and nutanix-nc2-azure-pool for origin servers on NC2 on Azure. To ensure minimal application services disruption, we update the HTTP Load Balancer for nutanix.f5-demo.com to include both new origin pools, and we assign them with a higher weight than the existing pool vmware-sj-pool so that the origin servers on Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on AWS and on Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Azure will receive more traffic compared to the origin servers in the VMware environment in the San Jose data center. Note that web application firewall (WAF) nutanix-demo is enabled. Finally, we remove vmware-sj-pool to complete the cloud migration. Cloud Repatriation In this example, xc.f5-demo.com is deployed in a multicloud environment across AWS and Azure. Our objective is to migrate the application back to the Nutanix environment in the San Jose data center from the public clouds. To begin, we deploy F5 Distributed Cloud Customer Edge (CE) and application workloads in Nutanix AHV. We deploy the application workloads using the same IP addresses as those in the public clouds because IP overlapping is not a concern with F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect. On the F5 Distributed Cloud Console, we create an origin pool nutanix-sj-pool with the origin servers originating from the Nutanix environment in the San Jose data center. We then update the HTTP Load Balancer for xc.f5-demo.com to include the new origin pool, and assign it with a higher weight than both existing pools: xc-aws-pool with origin servers on AWS and xc-azure-pool with origin servers on Azure. As a result, the origin servers in the Nutanix environment, located in the San Jose data center will receive more traffic compared to origin servers in other pools. To ensure all applications receive the same level of security protection, web application firewall (WAF) nutanix-demo is also applied here. To complete the cloud repatriation, we remove xc-aws-pool and xc-azure-pool. The application service experiences minimal disruption during and after the migration. Hybrid Multicloud Our goal in this example is to bring xc-nutanix.f5-demo.com into a hybrid multicloud environment, as it is presently deployed solely in the San Jose data center. We first deploy F5 Distributed Cloud Customer Edge (CE) and application workloads on Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on AWS as well as on Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Azure. We create an origin pool with origin servers originating from each of the F5 Distributed Cloud Customer Edge (CE) sites on the F5 Distributed Cloud Console. Next, we update the HTTP Load Balancer for xc-nutanix.f5-demo.com so that it includes all origin pools: nutanix-sj-pool (Nutanix AHV in our San Jose data center), nutanix-nc2-aws-pool (NC2 on AWS), and nutanix-nc2-azure-pool (NC2 on Azure). Note that web application firewall (WAF) nutanix-demo is applied here as well so that we can ensure a consistent level of security protection across all applications no matter where they are deployed. xc-nutanix.f5-demo.com is now in a hybrid multicloud environment. F5 Distributed Cloud Console is the centralized console for configuration management and observability. It provides real-time metrics and analytics, which allows us proactively monitor security events. Additionally, its integrated AI assistant delivers real-time insights and actionable recommendations of security events, enhancing our understanding of the security events and enabling more informed decision-making. This enables us to swiftly detect and respond to emerging threats, thereby sustaining a robust security posture. Conclusion Cloud application migration can be complex and challenging. F5 Distributed Cloud and Nutanix collaborate to offer a secure and streamlined solution that minimizes risk and disruption during and after the migration process, including those migrating from VMware environments. This ensures a seamless cloud application transition while maintaining business continuity throughout the entire process and beyond.
