Connect, secure, and load balance apps across multiple clouds
Simplify app delivery and app-to-app communication across clouds with an integrated networking and security services stack for monolithic and microservices apps.
Overview
Make deploying modern apps faster and simpler, with maximum security
A next-gen distributed load balancer and K8s ingress-egress controller that integrates a router, load balancer, network and app firewall, API gateway, and API security. It delivers significant savings through service integration, automation, and SaaS-based operation.
Challenges
Delivering modern and legacy apps requires multiple point products for connecting and securing apps, each with their own operational models and nuances of policy configuration.
Complex operations
A wide variety of point products are required to deliver an app, each with its own niche and config.
Inconsistent policies
Multiple individual policy configurations across products that don’t work the same in cloud and edge environments can result in misconfigurations and policy gaps.
Managing multiple disjointed instances
Instances must be managed separately with separate configurations and policies, with no unified observability.
No egress controls
Current tools only provide ingress control and lack egress capabilities, requiring additional product deployments and complexity.
Why Distributed Cloud Load Balancer and K8s Gateway?
Faster deployment and simplified ops
DevOps and developers can significantly simplify deployment operations of one or more load balancers and/or K8s ingress and egress controllers with our SaaS-based lifecycle management and multi-cluster control plane.
Maximum security
Reduce risks with multi-layer security, including ML-powered API discovery, DDoS mitigation, automated policy, and end-to-end encryption for compliance.
Increased uptime and reliability
Reduce downtime by relying on our advanced traffic management and global control plane that distributes endpoint health across all clusters and cloud locations.
Improve developer experience
Increase productivity by delivering APIs without having to deal with the underlying networking and routing. Give simple and secure access to services and accelerate service velocity.
How it Works
Connects and secures multi-cluster apps in the cloud, on-prem, edge, or the F5 global network.
A modern SaaS-based distributed load balancer and K8s gateway that seamlessly connects multiple app clusters across our global network, simplifying app-to-app security and network connectivity across clouds.
Key Capabilities
Load Balancing Ingress
TCP, UDP, or HTTP forward proxy to microservices.
Web App Firewall (WAF)
Keep attacks out of the cluster for every application.
API Gateway
Access controls include authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), role-based access control (RBAC), policy, rate limiting, and metering.
Service Discovery
K8s, Consul, or DNS. Optionally advertise cross-cluster.
Multi-Cluster Service Mesh
Service routing between clusters or clouds.
End-to-End Observability
App-aware logging for network, security, and APIs.
Load Balancer and Secure K8s Gateway Use Cases
Multi-Cluster Secure Kubernetes Gateway
An ingress-egress controller with integrated network and security services for multiple app clusters across the WAN.
Deliver Distributed Applications
Connect and load balance apps across multiple clouds wherever your apps reside with a single configuration and policy.
Multi-Cluster App Mesh
Advertise specific services and APIs with fine grained control and the ability to distribute security services outside your perimeter to protect your services/APIs.
Broad Platform and Cloud Provider Support
Distributed Cloud Services can be delivered to apps running on any platform, on any public/private cloud. Connect and secure apps running in VMs, containers, bare metal, or serverless.
Service Discovery and Service Mesh Integrations
Supports multiple service discovery protocols simultaneously. Consul, Kubernetes, and DNS work out of the box. Istio or Linkerd service mesh can integrate with a Distributed Cloud Services ingress/egress gateway.
Automation, Alerting, and SIEM Integration
F5’s native Terraform provider, vesctl CLI tool, and public APIs deliver to the automation needs of app teams. Support for tools like Opsgenie or Slack for alerting, and Splunk or Datadog for SIEM, simplify life for DevOps and SecOps teams.
Ways to Deploy
Distributed Cloud Services deliver application management, networking, and security services closer to workloads and can be deployed in public/private clouds, on-prem data centers, and edge sites with centralized management via a SaaS-based console.
Public cloud
Manage and protect application workloads hosted in AWS, Azure, and GCP.
F5 global PoPs
Manage and protect application workloads from any of the points of presence (PoPs) on the F5 global network.
On-premises
Manage and protect applications at the data center and edge sites.
