F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect vs. Microsoft Application Server (deprecated)

My advice is if your firm build multi-cloud, high availability SaaS products or you just run polyglot workloads across kubernetes and VMs, then F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect is your guy. Coming from an expert, just start with a few core services or else you will be overwhelmed.

Incentivized

Microsoft Application Server has been incredible this past year during COVID. Previously I would have said that we could go without it, but after this past season, I’m glad we have utilized it. Without having this software set up prior to COVID, we would have been in a tough situation. I mention COVID a lot because we were able to continue our work almost seamlessly this entire year.

• Ease of use - standing up a new site took very little time, less then an hour.
• Connecting the dots - the ease at standing up a load balancer and advertising it on CEs was simple and straight forward. Once you get familiar with the field layout it's very comparable to BIG-IP

Incentivized

• Microsoft Application Server has proven to be highly reliable and effective at deploying to all of its clients.
• Application performance is surprisingly good and responsive even in bandwidth-constrained environments and generally very reliable.
• All software programs are manageable from a single location, even when bandwidth is limited.

• User access roles should be more granular what we currently have
• user interface should be user friendly
• Setup process and guided workflows could add a user friendly process for first time users
• log export from SIEM tool still require a manual intervention

Incentivized

• Some security hotfixes and general release updates require restarts.
• We wish it supported more applications out of the box.
• Thin client support would be great for MS Application Server.

Incentivized

At this point it has become too focal to our operations. An entire department could collapse if we dropped it now or in the near future. My experiences as mentioned in the previous questions tell of its gravity

Incentivized

Because it’s so straightforward. There’s not much to it.

Incentivized

I have found Microsoft Application Server to be incredibly easy to use. I have used dozens of similar programs and have always struggled to navigate through all the functions. So far I have been able to adapt and learn this software with ease. I rarely run into a problem that I wasn’t easily able to move forward on with a few tips.

From what we have been able to test load/responsiveness is quick and when we've tested out reporting and troubleshooting modules they have pulled the correct information in quick timeframes. We haven't been able to test out any software integration with Splunk of other software on our system since we are still in early POC stages but from what we've been told we should be able to implement that in our environment

Incentivized

Stability is one of the first things we consider when evaluating software. MS Application Server has been rock solid and has reduced the time that our IT staff dedicates to maintaining our legacy applications.

Incentivized

-F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect provides more granular security policies with features like DOS, WAF etc and others lack -F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect provides high performance global network and other rely on public internet and impact is latency and it gives F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect a better user experience

Incentivized

It has a similar feature to what Microsoft Application Server has but at a greater cost and also having to deal with another vendor when we could use a full Microsoft Stack for better training and support.

Incentivized

• Inconsistent policies and procedures and now its all seem to be sorted and now requires less support
• Deployment cycle time was reduced and achieves a faster adoption of newly added contents
• Saved migration cost and more gave durability to the existing setup

Incentivized

• Our ROI has been great since it has enabled our IT staff to have a central location to perform application updates which enables us to save time and money.
• Deployment is very easy since the internal applications that required constant updating are now updated in one central location.
• It's a lot easier to be within compliance protocols requirements.

Incentivized