Cisco Application Control Engine vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

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

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

Incentivized

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

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

• 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