The way we build applications has changed a lot since 1996, when F5 BIG-IP was released. Companies that use F5 BIG-IP complain of high cost and lack of agility. In this webinar we describe how to replace or augment your F5 BIG-IP deployment with NGINX Plus for cost savings and greater agility.
Watch this webinar to learn:
- A brief history of F5 Networks and the BIG-IP, from initial release to early success
- About five industry trends that are disrupting F5 and making F5 BIG-IP a hindrance to the modern enterprise looking for agility
- Three ways to gracefully replace or augment F5 BIG-IP with NGINX Plus, without having to rip and replace
- About application architectures possible with NGINX Plus, but not with F5 BIG-IP, such as API gateways
On-Demand Link: https://www.nginx.com/resources/webinars/replacing-augmenting-f5-big-ip-nginx-plus/
3. What Is NGINX Plus?
Dynamic Application Gateway
• Load balancer
• Content cache
• Web server
• Security controls
• Dynamic modules
• Monitoring
• High availability (HA)
• Kubernetes Ingress controller
• Programmability
• Streaming Media
4. Agenda
• Introduction
• Five industry trends that are disrupting F5
• Three options to gracefully move away from F5
• Beyond F5
• Customer success story: AppNexus
• Summary
5. F5 Company Info
• Founded: 1996
• Headquarters: Seattle, WA, USA
• CEO: François Locoh-Donou
• Ticker: FFIV
• Customers: 22,500 (Gartner Magic Quadrant, ADC 2016)
• IPO: 1999, $10/share
• Annual Revenue: $2B
• CMV: $179.20
• Market Cap: $10.791B
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F5.com, circa 1997
Source: web.archive.org
6. The Rise of F5
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"Large-capacity servers are so expensive today that many companies are unable to justify the
additional cost and are left with unreliable, slow sites. With BIG/ip, a System Administrator can
add lower cost servers to the Web site and achieve outstanding price/performance.”
- Jeff Hussey, Founder of F5 Labs, 1997
Source: web.archive.org/web/19971013115526/http://www.f5.com:80/release1.htm
7. Today F5 is Struggling
• F5 FY2018 numbers good on surface, but digging deeper shows cracks:
◦ Product revenue down 0.5% year over year
◦ Within product revenue, systems revenue down 4% year over year
◦ Product revenue < Services revenue
• What does this mean?
◦ People are not buying new F5 BIG-IP hardware like they used to
◦ People are holding onto existing F5 BIG-IP longer than standard 3-5 year refresh cycle
◦ F5 being propped up by existing support contracts
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“The number of recent [F5] executive departures is alarming.”
–Jason Ader, Analyst, William Blair, 2015
8. Agenda
• Introduction
• Five industry trends that are disrupting F5
• Three options to gracefully move away from F5
• Beyond F5
• Customer success story: AppNexus
• Summary
9. Five Industry Trends Disrupting F5
1. DevOps
2. Public Cloud
3. Commodity Hardware
4. Open Source
5. Microservices
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“The market is moving away from [F5], and is not coming back.”
–Trip Chowdry, Analyst, Global Equities Research
10. Trend 1: DevOps
Where F5 comes up short:
• Takes weeks to resolve IT tickets to get a simple application update deployed
• Still very manual process of stepping through UI
• VLANS, IPs, and other networking config exposed for each virtual server
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“It takes 2 weeks to get an F5 modification from the networking team. You know how long it takes us to change NGINX? It takes 30 seconds to make the
change in GitHub, and then we run the Ansible script. Ta-da, production.”
– Engineer at large telco company
Why NGINX Plus is the better choice:
• Fully automatable, no need to file IT tickets
• Works with all DevOps tools
• No VLANs or IPs per virtual server
11. Trend 2: Public Cloud
Where F5 comes up short:
• SaaS companies taking business, no need to load balance Exchange servers if
using Office 365
• More expensive than hardware appliances, don’t want to cannibalize hardware
sales
• 5 Gbps throughput limit with pre-built AMIs
• Throughput limits requires license upgrade, can’t scale up or down as needed
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“We need to manage applications on top of any infrastructure platform, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and other cloud platform providers. NGINX Plus
provides us the flexibility to deliver applications across different infrastructure options.”
– Nate Johnson, CEO and Founder at Reliam
Why NGINX Plus is the better choice:
• Biggest NGINX Plus customers are SaaS companies
• NGINX Plus is cloud-native software
• 40% AWS deployments use NGINX
• No throughput limits, site licensing to scale up and down as needed
12. Trend 3: Commodity Hardware
Where F5 comes up short:
• No bare metal option, VMs only
• Custom hardware 6x the cost of equivalent commodity server
• x86 support only
• Custom hardware takes longer to procure
• Custom hardware leads to overprovisioning to avoid costly mid-refresh cycle
upgrade
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“In the past when faced with a failure, we had to wait for replacement hardware and hope it arrived before another failure. Now with NGINX, we have
much more flexibility. If a machine fails we can quickly and seamlessly replace it, because our reliance on hardware has been significantly reduced.”
– Matt Blaha, Sr. Systems Engineer at Discovery Education
Why NGINX Plus is the better choice:
• Can run bare metal
• Commodity hardware 1/6 the cost of custom hardware
• X86, ARM64, and PPC support
• Commodity hardware readily available
• Able to right size the deployment using commodity hardware
13. Trend 4: Open Source
Where F5 comes up short:
• Not part of open source ecosystem
• Limited community support
• Closed source means tied to F5 success or failure
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“In a future that includes competition from open source, we can expect that the eventual destiny of any software technology will be to either die or
become part of the open infrastructure itself.”
– Eric S Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, 1997
Why NGINX Plus is the better choice:
• Key play in open source ecosystem
• Wealth of community resources and contributions
• Purchase protection, NGINX Open Source lives on regardless of NGINX, Inc.
14. Trend 5: Microservices
Where F5 comes up short:
• No container option
• No true Kubernetes Ingress Controller solution
• Heavyweight, not portable
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“As we moved to microservices we’ve realized that we needed a much smarter way of routing pages to our applications...We realized that NGINX Plus,
with its better support, with its DNS resolving, and the advanced metrics that we get now is the way forward. NGINX Plus allowed us to get to the final
mile.”
– John Cleveley, Senior Engineering Manager, Buzzfeed
Why NGINX Plus is the better choice:
• Can run in containers, top downloaded application on Docker Hub
• Supported Kubernetes Ingress Controller
• Lightweight and portable
15. Agenda
• Introduction
• Five industry trends that are disrupting F5
• Three options to gracefully move away from F5
• Beyond F5
• Customer success story: AppNexus
• Summary
16. 1. NGINX Plus Behind F5
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• Easiest way to introduce NGINX Plus into
your network
• F5 layer 4 load balances to NGINX Plus
• Can start small with one application being
behind NGINX Plus and then expand
17. 2. NGINX Plus Alongside F5
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• Parallel NGINX Plus deployment
• Good architecture if adopting public
cloud while still keeping private
datacenter
• Can also start small with one application
being behind NGINX Plus and then
expand
18. 3. NGINX Plus Instead of F5
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• F5 completely decommissioned, use
NGINX Plus for all load balancing
• Previous 2 architectures are
intermediaries to this eventual goal
19. Agenda
• Introduction
• Five industry trends that are disrupting F5
• Three options to gracefully move away from F5
• Beyond F5
• Customer success story: AppNexus
• Summary
20. Micro Load Balancers
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• Load balancer per application
• Load balancer per customer for SaaS
providers
• Configuration stored along with
application in GitHub
• Fully portable
21. Kubernetes Ingress Controller
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• NGINX commonly used as Ingress Controller
• F5 has Ingress Controller solution, but it is just a
container that reprograms F5 BIG-IP hardware
22. API Gateway
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• 40% of deploy NGINX instances are used as API
gateway
• Capital One handles 12 billion transactions per day
with NGINX API gateway
• F5 BIG-IP cannot be used as an API gateway
23. Introducing NGINX Controller
Centralized monitoring and management for NGINX Plus
• Alerting
• API management
• Configuration analysis
• Customizable dashboards
• Load balancer management
• Monitoring
Learn more: nginx.com/products/nginx-controller
24. Agenda
• Introduction
• Five industry trends that are disrupting F5
• Three options to gracefully move away from F5
• Beyond F5
• Customer success story: AppNexus
• Summary
25. Moving to the next generation of F5 hardware was
going to cost more than $1M per data center. NGINX
Plus gave us 50% more transactions per server, for
one-sixth the price. We’re now 100% hardware free.
“
-- Senior Networking Leader, AppNexus
“
ROI
26. Agenda
• Introduction
• Five industry trends that are disrupting F5
• Three options to gracefully move away from F5
• Beyond F5
• Customer success story: AppNexus
• Summary
27. Summary
• F5 BIG-IP is the aging veteran of the tech industry
• The market has moved away from F5, and they have not kept up
• Three ways to replace F5 BIG-IP with NGINX Plus
• Replacing F5 with NGINX Plus opens up new architectures such as API gateway
• AppNexus saved over 50% while getting the benefits of a software solution by replacing F5 BIG-IP with
NGINX Plus
28. Download our Free Ebook
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• How to migrate F5 BIG-IP configuration and iRules to NGINX, with detailed
examples
• How to pick out a standard x86 server
• How to install and configure Linux
• Why you should go with a software load balancer, and not hardware
Download now: nginx.com/resources/library/f5-
big-ip-nginx-migration-guide/
29. Q & ATry NGINX Plus and NGINX WAF free for 30 days: nginx.com/free-trial-request
Notes de l'éditeur
- We will
F5 was first to market with a load balancing solution. Prior to F5 BIG-IP most websites were running off a single server, which meant a single point of failure. Sites were unreliable and down quite often.
- We will
- We will
- We will
NGINX Controller is a centralized monitoring and management platform for NGINX Plus. Easily manage multiple NGINX Plus instances from a single, beautiful interface. Uncover performance insights in real time with rich monitoring. Configure application delivery policies from a single point of control. NGINX Controller puts you in strategic command of your entire application.
