Why F5’s BIG-IP?

BIG-IP has anywhere from a 60% to a 25% market share in the “ADC” (Application Delivery Controller …AKA “Load Balancer”), depending on who you talk to. Folks like Seeking Alpha question if F5 Networks is the next Cisco, given their market share and financial outlooks.  Cisco got out of the Load Balancer market, most likely because they felt they could not compete with F5.

So why would you use an F5 BIG-IP product? In some cases, you would not!  If all you need to do is simple round-robin load balancing of several web servers, you should NOT use an F5 BIG-IP – it’s over kill. Its like using a Porsche to drive down a forest trail. The power of an BIG-IP is that it can do so many things at the same time it’s load balancing traffic to your services and applications.  If all you are doing is simple Load Balancing of an Internet service, you might be better off using something like HA-Proxy or Nginix.  If you are looking for secure access to a web-based service, or things like Protocol Normalization or Web Access Firewall (WAF) while Load Balancing your web servers, than F5’s BIG-IP is worth looking at.

F5’s BIG-IP is it’s own worse enemy when it comes time to try and sell it.  Having spent seven years selling BIG-IP’s, I can tell you that the fact that it is SO VERSITILE is also a detriment when trying to sell it.  This website documents many different ways to use a BIG-IP, so hopefully you can understand why I say this.

F5’s BIG-IP is a Programmable Network Node!  If there is a function or feature that is not included in the base BIG-IP product, most likely is can be programmed using the iRules or iRulesLX feature.  I’ve done things like doing a database looking up on some incoming data before passing the connection on….Called external APIs to retrieve information that needed to be added to a request to the downstream service….Corrected payloads to accommodate two different nodes that were supposedly talking the same protocol (IE> Protocol Normalization)….Inserted Javascript on a web server response to inject ads….all done using iRules or iRulesLX. For a solutions guy like me, this is very powerful stuff!  I can make corrections or add features to commercial products without having to change that code — I just do on the BIG-IP.

I spent many a year as an Operations person, and I can tell you without a doubt that having an F5 BIG-IP in front of any application or service you are responsible for is a God Send! When I was working in Operations at a big Cellular operator in North America, our bonuses were based on uptime of the applications we were responsible for. Since I had an F5 BIG-IP in front of my picture messaging system, my uptime was always 100%, since any bad or unresponsive nodes were automatically taken out of service by the BIG-IP. I could do upgrades of my system by taking a number of nodes out of the Load Balancing (LB) Pool, upgrade them, and add them back to the LB pool when they were back in operation. We could split out a number of nodes for testing new features or revisions of software by creating a new Virtual Service.  We could limit access to new revisions of software on specific nodes by only allowing specific clients to access the new software!  It was such a God-Send for those of us in Operations.

One thing to note: BIG-IPs are not cheap.  People tend to balk at the price, but if you look at all the things you are going to do with it, and compare what the price would be for other products you would have to purchase to do what a BIG-IP can do by itself, you start to see that it actually is rather cheap.  ….oh, and don’t forget to compare how much rack space all the other solutions would be taking up.  I’ve seen a company go from nine full racks of other company’s gear down to one half of a rack with BIG-IPs.