A10 Networks offers their application delivery controller, Thunder ADC.
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F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
Score 9.5 out of 10
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F5 states that the "brain" of the BIG-IP platform, Local Traffic Manager (LTM) intelligently manages network traffic so applications are always fast, available, and secure.
I mean the only reason we changed away from it was price and it just simply had to do with the licensing that Citrix was offering on the NetScalers. They had basically an all you can eat consumption license that we were easily inside of with all of our VDI usage, whereas with F5 we had to buy the hardware and we had to license the software. Any place you need to actually do traffic balancing at scale, it's a fantastic product. I couldn't recommend it highly enough. There's just some things that hardware SSL offload and hardware load balancing just simply can't be equal that I don't know if there's a better product on the market for that.
Sure. It does load balancing fantastically. I mean, it's an industry standard product for that. We also use it for TLS offload for applications. Those are the two main use cases for that. We do also use some of the I rules for traffic filtering. We've used that in some of the external facing services. It does a really nice job with that. It's a little bit complicated sometimes and some of the Cipher Suite stuff is interesting.
Some of the stuff you have to dive into the CLI to really use, I'm going to reach back to the previous employer for this. So I had a much greater degree of involvement with it at that point in time for, I was the crypto guy at the company and I had to design all the cipher suites that we actually implemented on our front end banking products. So in order to do that, I had to dive into it, download all the Cipher suites, figure out the actual order of operation for them, how they were selected because I wanted to design the Cipher Suites to actually provide a specific customer experience for the types of connections that our customers were likely to initiate. Getting at that information was a giant PITA. It was poorly documented at the time. I'm not sure if it's documented any better now. Every time the software changed or got upgraded, made your version, I'd have to do it all over again because the upgrades to the stack, which looked like it was based on open SSL, but it was heavily modified with a different syntax. Oh yay. That's fun too. So I had to write giant documents describing all of the ciphers that I was designing for this because it just kept changing all the time. So I didn't care for that aspect of it. Traffic management does a great job for that.
F5 has always been one of the best products we have in the data center. We had few issues with the BUG and Code upgrades but the main use cases for F5 was always top notch. From High availability to Globally load balancing applications across multiple data centers and muti cloud environments.
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is very easy to use. Building each application is straightforward forward and the help function and now with the new AI assistant soon to be available, it is going to be easier than ever to be able to understand and implement each application.
Support said the devices will work in our environment but when we had the device working we realized that it was not possible to do what we wanted, for this reason, our experience was not entirely good and we did not like the way they approached us for the sale of the device.
F5 is doing its specialized function. There is no other product that can beat them. We are extremely happy with the product. Especially on load balancing, traffic redirecting TLS encryption, and SNI modification. We will continue to explore F5's product, especially on the public cloud side. e.g. NGINX.
A10 Thunder ADC had a negative impact on the company, due to the fact that the client had to monitor a large number of sites, which could not be achieved with this device.
This led to looking for another alternative.
It is more beneficial for companies that do not need to monitor a large number of websites as the security and stability provided by the device are excellent.
