Akamai Ion vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

• Akamai Ion is excellent if you have the staff to manage the configurations and understand how best to leverage its benefits amidst ongoing Dev work without getting in their way. You'll have to communicate consistently on what the CDN does and does not do as well as drive knowledge sharing sessions on expected behavior or unexpected behavior to help reduce unnecessary troubleshooting from your IT and Dev teams when tickets/issues arise.
• Akamai Ion is best suited for well equipped and well informed IT or Marketing teams that can leverage the delivery benefits of caching and offload. Doing so will increase customer satisfaction, reduce bounce rates, improve conversion rates as well as drive more time on site.

Incentivized

There was a need to have the DR environment to be available actively but not to send the traffic unless the production is down The F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) priority feature helped achieving it. It was well suited in handling the HTTP headers using polices and iRules. It was less appropriate from the application security perspective in the current version. But after attending the AppWorld 2024, I see a lot of ways to protect the network and the application with several features.

Incentivized

• Ease of management with good UI for making rules and behaviors.
• There is also an API and Code integration for the advanced Dev-Ops team to use as well.

Incentivized

• Does web traffic management very well.
• To allow API's to work with our in house services
• To make intelligent load balancing decisions.

Incentivized

• The learning curve on using a CDN is steep and requires class time. The initial onboarding and integration with the business' DevOps teams should be a bit closer relationship.
• Global vs. Regional management can be a bit challenging if your account is centralized overseas, and you want a local time-zone account manager on your time.

Incentivized

• Time investment in creating Virtual Servers across many LTMs
• Ability to change object names after creation
• Support ability to troublshoot iRUles

Incentivized

• Support for tickets has gotten better/quicker over the years.
• Also, there is a wealth of information on the knowledge base, documentation, and there is also a message board too now.

Incentivized

As far as I know, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) from F5 is the best and the number of features is unmatched compared to its competitors. The first-time setup is also quick and easy and the product behaves as a full proxy which is rarely seen. The support is good and also the help articles are numerous.

Incentivized

• Improved conversion rates.
• Reduced page load times.

Incentivized

• Negative impact in that it makes it very easy for applications to be spun up but cleanup of old/ unused deployments do not happen causing resources to be consumed unnecessarily
• When used in a multiblade viprion guest, issues with backplane and blade replication causing impact
• Ability to deploy multiple instances helped with network segmentation

Incentivized