A really powerful multi-cloud mesh
Updated July 25, 2025
A really powerful multi-cloud mesh
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect
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
- The full observability into service flows
- Service meshes
- Standardization of zero-trust security policies
- 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
It's pretty clear that these two are fine within a single ecosystem but fall short when the architecture spans more than one cloud vendor.
Do you think F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect's feature set?
Yes
Did F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect again?
Yes
Using F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect
6 - We deliberately keep the usage scoped to the specialists who design, deploy and manage client environments that span multiple clouds or require deep api governance. The functions represented - Cloud architecture, that's my role. We also have 2 guys on client solutions delivery, one for site reliability, and the others on devops engineering
2 - We have 2 senior level engineers doing this - one cloud architect (myself) and one lead devops engineer. Several skills are obviously needed, but it essentially comes down to strong networking fundamentals around mesh patterns and some good experience with container orchestration
- secure service to service connectivity across hybrid and multicloud environments
- API exposure and protection - i explained this in detail in the previous section
- Granular access control at the app layer
- the zero trust model
- Shadow testing and gradual rollout for backend changes - oh I loved this one. We used app connect's traffic splitting features to shadow traffic to new backend services without impacting production flow. It helped us detect unexpected behavior before going live, sth that was hard to do with just kurbenetes native tools
- SaaS-client onboarding automations using terraform + app connect APIs. We are actually actively looking into this
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