F5 BIG-IP software from Seattle-based F5 Networks is a load balancing and application protection solution suite available on cloud or via virtual editions, on a subscription or perpetual licensing basis.
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F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
Score 9.6 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.
F5 BIG-IP Vs Netscaler Traffic Manager by Citrix I would say there is no comparison. Netscaler was difficult to use and no one easily understood the configurations. It led to many times where our engineers would need to reverse engineer the configuration before they could …
We combine the AWAF and F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager to not only deliver high performance apps but also secure the apps against so many kinds of threats.
The F5 LTMs integrate great with the F5 DNS appliances and makes on the fly decisions using iquery. We have two HA data centers that the F5 LTMs are used in and integrate great with teh F5 DNS servers.
Definitely in larger environments, more mature organizations that obviously have the budget to spend and want best in class. Where it struggles is those organizations that don't have the funding and money to spend on it and need more basic functionality. So I'd say that's smaller customers we've worked with and kind of mid-market. They tend to get scared when they get the quotes. Also we've had some struggles with account team consistency. So for the sales team, just a lot of turnover and a lot of missteps on customer calls.
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.
I mean from a basic level, it actually satisfies all the use cases we have, which is basically to have multiple web servers for the front end and then you want that to be equally split across. The traffic comes in from all over the world. We use DRA protection and everything, but then we also internally want to make sure all the servers are being utilized and we provide much more availability across all servers. We just make sure BIG-IP sits in between and handles the traffic accordingly. And it's pretty basic and it comes to drawing traffic. It's pretty easy to configure and set it up and then forget.
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.
Recently we have been deploying F5 web application firewall and we have started the deployment. We have already moved applications out there, but we are not yet to the point wherein I could comment any positive feedback or any negative feedback because we are still going through it, right. But as far as I'm concerned, I don't see any drawbacks or any shortcomings on the F5 product lineup.
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.
It's not difficult to understand the parts of application configurations and features. Setting up new virtual servers with multiple profiles, certificates, and nodes is easy for new users through the web interface, which also translates to programability in scripts, DevOps, or other configuration management use-cases. Users from different backgrounds such as networking and infrastructure can use F5 BIG-IP, while users who are familiar with API calls can easily configure objects without needing to understand the platform at all.
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.
On the occasions when we've had to engage f5 support, they have been great. They have always resolved our issues quickly and been easy to work with and professional. The reason I give them a 10 out of 10, however, is because when we've had issues that have crossed over between the f5 BIG-IP, our Cisco switches, and our Microsoft IIS server the f5 support representatives have been extremely knowledgeable about every product and device involved and have been able to troubleshoot end-to-end without having to engage other vendors.
That's the one thing that really stood out. It was a lot easier to use from an administrator standpoint, so I think that's the one thing that really made our team decide to go with this product versus another competitor. Just ease of use.
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.
