Item: F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is used to load balance 100s of applications in both On-premise and Cloud in our organization. The applications are always deployed in more than 1 servers to maintain high availability in which case the F5 helps a lot of keep Active-Active application environment. There are some applications use priority base load balancing which is a key part of business need.

Pros and Cons

iRules implementation in case of handling some critical routing logics.
Policies to add/remove the HTTP response headers as required by the application and security to be compliance
Import and update SSL certificates. It is very easy to update the certificate to the profiles seamlessly without impact to the users with no downtime.

iRule editor is one of the places need a lot of improvement.
Confirm alert window before performing any changes to the iRule or any virtual configuration changes.
Undo option would be a good feature to add in case any mistyping or human error happened while saving a change. Right now, once the change is made, there is no way of going back unless I copy or take a screenshot of the current configuration in order to go back. It also impacts the application until the old configuration is put back.

Return on Investment

F5 is widely used for every applications that are deployed and it is efficiently used in our organization.
In several troubleshooting, F5 and its monitoring and logging helped to investigate the issue and figure out the root cause in a quick manner.
When some functionalities are deprecated, the existing iRules would get impacted during the upgrade, which requires good amount of time to figure out the replacement. Sometimes there is a situation to fall back.

Key Insights

Do you think F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)'s feature set?

Yes

Did F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) An Indeed Need In The Apps World

Overall Satisfaction with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)