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F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect

Score9.1 out of 10

19 Reviews and Ratings

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What is F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect?

Securely connects distributed apps and services across public cloud, on-premises, and edge environments. Utilizing Infrastructure as Code, App Connect provisions resources and maintain uniform policies across multiple sites.

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Reviews

What users are saying about F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect.
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F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect Review

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it primarily to let users into the network, to log in either for VDI or to RDP to their workspaces.

Pros

  • Connectivity—it’s really efficient, no hassle product. We like it. We love it.

Cons

  • Honestly, I can’t think of one right now. We’ve had good success with it.

Return on Investment

  • Positive.

Other Software Used

SRM & TPRM Platform by Enlighta, LogicGate

Usability

A really powerful multi-cloud mesh

Incentivized
Jake Williamson
Cloud Architect in Information Technology at Quantum Flairs (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Most of our clients operate in fragmented environments: GCP for ML workloads, aws for backends and on-prem databases. So we are using F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect to stitch these services together securely and consistently across environments. We are also using it to standardize zero-trust security policies across workloads. But this is mostly for clients in fintech and healthcare.

Pros

  • It's so good at multi-cloud service sprawl. Most clients don't want to be locked into a single cloud and that's where F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect thrives. It is the true unifying fabric.
  • Another one is fragile edge failover and routing.
  • A good access drift between environments.

Cons

  • Right now, the documentation leans toward abstract explanations and often leaves gaps when implementing more advanced routing topologies.
  • The terraform provider is decent but inconsistent

Most Important Features

  • The full observability into service flows
  • Service meshes
  • Standardization of zero-trust security policies

Return on Investment

  • It has cut down engineering time for fragile edge failovers by over 40 percent - on high availability setups
  • An overall lowered cost of ownership for cloud networking, i estimate it to be around 20%
  • Reduced deployment complexity by half

Alternatives Considered

AWS App Mesh and Azure Service Fabric

Other Software Used

AWS CloudFormation, Azure AI Studio, (EOL) Cisco CloudCenter

very productive and secure have been using for last 2 years really like the product and would recommend it

Incentivized
Ashish Goel
IT Manager in Engineering at SMRT (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

very productive and secure, have been using for last 2 years, really like the product and would recommend it

Pros

  • app security

Cons

  • protection from malware

Most Important Features

  • cloud API

Return on Investment

  • very productive and secure, have been using for last 2 years, really like the product and would recommend it

Alternatives Considered

11:11 Hosted Private Cloud

Other Software Used

11:11 Hosted Private Cloud, 360 Total Security, 360 App Services Inc

Verify this before seeking for other vendors

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Instrumental in transforming our application networking and security framework. We utilize the platform to effortlessly link distributed applications across diverse cloud environments, ensuring uniform performance, robust security, and comprehensive observability -Easily connect different applications via APIs, security, scalability

Pros

  • Transitioning of legacy management system to microservices hosted in multiple clouds.
  • One application was running in multiple regions so edge services for faster user experience

Cons

  • 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

Most Important Features

  • Numerous aspects within infra where we require a zero trust security and features like Geo-Fencing and IP Reputation Filtering, WAF, granular access policies
  • Syncing between services of google cloud and AWS and features like Federated Identity Management, load balancing, Identity aware routing, Service discovery across cloud boundaries and DNS
  • The synchronization between on Prem and cloud services and features like Identity-aware routing, Layer 7 load balancing, serrvice discovery between on-prem and cloud, Zero trust policy enforcement

Return on Investment

  • 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

Alternatives Considered

AWS App Mesh and Azure Service Fabric

Other Software Used

Barracuda Application Protection, F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM), F5 BIG-IP DNS

Our Cloud Backbone

Incentivized
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

When we were forced to accelerate our move from on prem to cloud post Covid 2 years ago, the biggest challenge was securing connectivity between legacy ERP systems in our data center and the new workloads we were standing up in Azure. App connect's ability to bridge those environments through encrypted tunnels gave us a way to transition without exposing supply chain data. 2 years down the line and still underpins the operations on our cloud based systems.

Pros

  • service mesh across multiple clusters
  • good observability across APIs

Cons

  • The custom policy creation is anything but flexible no matter how much you stress the tool

Most Important Features

  • Edge network optimization ensures low latency supplier and customer transactions across global regions
  • multicloud connectivity

Return on Investment

  • Biggest one so far is when it cut migration time by about half in our 2023 on prem to cloud transition
  • Supplier API onboarding came down to days, sometimes even hours from weeks

Other Software Used

F5 Distributed Cloud App Stack, Cisco Catalyst Switches, IBM Maximo Application Suite

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