F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect vs. Rackspace Fabric

F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect Would be incredibly useful when having to juggle multiple cloud providers. Also XC would be fantastic for standardization and consistency of the whole networking stack. It may be less useful for incredibly specialized cases where very specific traffic manipulation is needed. Any use-cases with heavy APM usage would have to be carefully considered as those features didn’t make it into XC yet.

Incentivized

I am highly likely to recommend Rackspace Cloud Monitoring to a colleague. This is assuming they have a decent background in working on cloud servers. If you don't mind digging in yourself to solve problems, then this is a great resource. If you are just learning how to set up servers on your own, then I recommend at least hiring someone to help you use the service. With that being said, Rackspace makes it easy for people you may hire to seamlessly work within your account. They get their own separate developer account.

Incentivized

• Centralized Hybrid ingress for our cloud workloads
• Centralized ingress for our existing on-prem BIG-IP devices
• Application visibility to address end-to-end visibility into the end-user experience

Incentivized

• Immediate email notifications: In case a service is down on our servers, we get immediate email notifications via rackspace cloud monitoring service. This helps us to know about the issues and we get in contact with support team to get it resolved.
• Configuration on specific services: We can configure this monitoring on specific services. So for example if i don't want to get notified if MySQL concurrent users limit reached, then I do not need to configure this monitoring for MySQL. I can just use it whenever needed for defined services.
• Group emails and technical contacts emails: The monitoring service can send email alerts to a number of email addresses. Primarily the ones who are added as a technical contact. It helps all people get notified about any issue.
• Auto ticket management: Rackspace automatically creates a support ticket when a service is down and is notified by their monitoring service.

Incentivized

• The support model needs a quite a bit of work. I personally have experienced an outage on the platform. due to mis-configureation Although the outage was due to engineer error it took over 2 hours before we were able to speak to an engineer
• Proxy v2 protocol to allow our organization to capture and view the source IP address

Incentivized

• It would be nice if there were more templates so that beginners could easily create complex monitors
• I seemed to stumble upon the cloud monitoring service after having Rackspace for a while

Incentivized

Overall, F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect is responsive and has many features. There is minor clunkiness in how certain scroll bars are layered. This may cause some adverse experience when trying to manage this product through a zoomed browser. Page loading and refresh timers were all very much responsive. There is a good amount of feedback from the interface as well.

Incentivized

Aviatrix operates like a slightly different version of XC. Mostly it relies on routing, where cloud connect takes a whole stack into consideration. Not sure if XC can fully replace Aviatrix, but after a couple of implementations, it may become apparent. There are similar routing features in both. XC has more overall features.

Incentivized

I also used Monitis as a monitoring service for our server. Rackspace'S monitoring sends immediate notifications while Monitis might take a couple minutes to understand if a service is down. Since Rackspace has their monitoring integrated with their support system, it helps us a lot and we don't need to call support all the time.

Incentivized

• As it helps monitor for any attacks, it can definitely save the business money in case of attacks by finding it quickly

Incentivized

• I have overpaid in the past for services I didn't need
• The steepish learning curve might slow things down at first
• I have learned a lot using Rackspace Cloud Monitoring!

Incentivized