With the acceleration of enterprise cloud, the market has put forward higher requirements for cloud computing, and the development of distributed cloud computing in China has entered the actual implementation stage. As a company known for load balancing, F5 actively explores the development direction and path of distributed cloud computing. In order to meet the new development direction and new needs of some enterprises, F5 load balancing capabilities have been integrated into a more effective management model, namely the F5 Global Distributed Cloud Platform.
In the past, F5 invested a lot of technical strength in the data center, deploying F5 load balancing, intelligent scheduling, firewalls, WAF, DDoS and other components. Since 2020, F5 has invested more technical R&D efforts in the development of distributed cloud, including designers, architects, developers, and operations personnel. F5 concepts and knowledge are gradually deployed in the F5 Globally Distributed Cloud, including an exploration of the F5 load balancing space. Over the years, F5 has evolved distributed cloud into a relatively mature platform. At present, quite a number of regional nodes have been deployed in the world, and alliances have been formed with cloud manufacturers, including overseas Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google. F5's distributed nodes can be deployed on the cloud, in a data center, or on a PC device.
Throughout the landing of the distributed cloud, F5 designed it into two layers. The global SaaS management model, the customer center management platform can be used directly on the Internet, is a multi-tenant operating environment, coupled with today's DevOps, i.e., the modern development model, is a modern control plane. F5 fully supports the direct deployment of open source cloud native applications, and the base adopts the K8S platform, so that the entire resource utilization rate reaches a relatively high level, which is consistent with the development path of today's container platform, and the new generation of applications will be released in a containerized way to obtain very fast application deployment, and the mutual access routes of applications can be displayed one by one on the cloud platform.
Another important level is security. F5 dissolves the security base in a full-stack distributed cloud architecture, unlocking the decentralized development of today's applications with the security base. F5 brings the entire SASE concept proposed by Gartner to the development of full-stack distributed clouds, using artificial intelligence systems to learn and analyze user behavior, thereby improving the security elements of the entire distributed cloud. In addition, with today's auto scaling capabilities, customers can quickly launch edge nodes. Edge nodes can only purchase a small box or off-the-shelf x86 products, which can be deployed directly. Such a node can be born without complex configuration and complex development.
Through F5 technology, the global F5 load balancing capability is used to make the application as close as possible to the customer's actual use environment, greatly reducing latency and ensuring communication quality. F5 provides the unique advantages of key technologies in a multi-cloud environment, whether it spans different cloud sites, data centers, hybrid environments, or enterprise edge station environments, F5 can help enterprises achieve rapid connectivity between networks and workloads, help carry larger business traffic, effectively cover the most important and sudden applications, and truly improve the efficiency of investment.