F5 APPLICATION DELIVERY SERVICES IN THE GOOGLE CLOUD

F5 APPLICATION DELIVERY

SERVICES IN THE GOOGLE

CLOUD

Public cloud vendors oer enterprises increased scalability and ﬂexibility,

alongwith a reduction in infrastructure and operational costs. As a result, 89

percent of companies are housing part of their application portfolio in the public

cloud.

Whether located in the public cloud, private cloud, or an on-premises data

center, applications require speciﬁc services to ensure their security, availability, and

performance. F5® BIG-IP® virtual editions (VEs) provide all of these beneﬁts. Now

fully integrated into the Google Cloud Engine, BIG-IP VEs extend F5’s application

delivery capabilities beyond that of the traditional data center perimeter.

OVERVIEW

F5 APPLICATION DELIVERY SERVICES IN THE GOOGLE CLOUD

CHALLENGE

Inﬁnite scalability, unmatched ﬂexibility, and reduced overheads make computing in the public cloud

seem like the perfect IT solution. However, many enterprises making the shift to the cloud do so

amidst concerns that their applications’ security and performance may be diminished, or that they’ll

fall victim to vendor lock-in and incur large re-architecting costs. This is a common fear, with a recent

study ﬁnding that 78 percent of IT decision makers worry about the portability of their workloads in

the cloud.

Increased network segregation and inconsistent application services across hybrid cloud

architectures are also placing additional strain on IT departments while generating new security

vulnerabilities for attackers to take advantage of. But it doesn’t need to be this way.

SOLUTION

Following continued adoption of the Google Cloud among enterprises, F5 has made BIG-IP virtual

editions available in the Google Cloud Launcher, which deploys VEs directly into a virtual cloud

environment. Because VEs are built on the same base code as BIG-IP hardware, they can oer

complete feature parity with their physical counterparts. This allows you to take advantage of the

scalability and ﬂexibility of the public cloud without jeopardizing application performance and security.

Whether you decide to run your applications entirely in the Google Cloud or across a hybrid cloud

architecture, F5 will protect your applications and data. F5’s application services can also be quickly

and easily replicated across data centers and all leading cloud environments—reducing

re-architecting time and costs, should you ever need to relocate your application workloads.

EMPLOY ENTERPRISE-CLASS SECURITY FOR GOOGLE CLOUD APPLICATIONS

Public cloud security can be broken down into two distinct categories: security of the cloud and

security in the cloud. The ﬁrst relates to the security of the underpinning infrastructure including

compute resources, databases, and networking, which is the sole responsibility of the cloud

provider. On the other hand, security in the cloud implies the security of any applications and

theirsupporting data, which is ultimately the responsibility of the application owner.

Running BIG-IP VEs in your Google Cloud environment and taking advantage of F5’s advanced

L4–7 security services is the easiest and most eective way of ensuring your applications and

network are continuously protected. At the network level, BIG-IP® Advanced Firewall Manager™

Virtual Edition (AFM VE) defends against large volumetric based DDoS attacks. At the application

level, BIG-IP® Application Security Manager™ Virtual Edition (ASM VE) mitigates against common

application vulnerabilities and L7 DDoS attacks, while providing protection against all OWASP top

10 threats. Should you already have BIG-IP security modules elsewhere within your hybrid-cloud

infrastructure, it’s simple to replicate the custom security policies you currently employ onto BIG-IP

VEs in the Google Cloud—ensuring consistent security across your architecture.

KEY BENEFITS

• Cut costs by scaling in the cloud,

not on premises

• Protect customer data anywhere

within a hybrid cloud architecture

• Easily move workloads between

Google Cloud and data centers

• Maintain high availability of web

applications

• Keep sensitive data on premises

• Increase agility of deployment

through automation

• Simplify architecture with a single

set of programmable, consistent

app services

• Provide advanced app services

for apps running in GKE and GKE

On-Prem

F5 APPLICATION DELIVERY SERVICES IN THE GOOGLE CLOUD

BIG-IP

ASM

BIG-IP

ASM

BIG-IP

AFM

BIG-IP

LTM

BIG-IP

LTM

BIG-IP

ASM

BIG-IP

LTM

BIG-IP

APM

BIG-IP

DNS

BIG-IP

LTM

us-west1-a us-west1-b

Database Web Apps

Active

Directory

Web Apps Web Apps

ON-PREMISES DATA CENTER

GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM

GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM—WESTERN U.S.

GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM—WESTERN EUROPE

CORPORATE SUBNET

Google Cloud

Interconnect

On-Premises

Net

BIG-IP

ASM

BIG-IP

LTM

BIG-IP

ASM

BIG-IP

LTM

europe-west1-a europe-west1-b

Web Apps Web Apps

Figure 1: F5 offers consistent enterprise-class application services to applications located anywhere within

hybrid-cloud architectures.

INCREASE FLEXIBILITY AND SCALABILITY WITH CLOUD BURSTING

The promise of limitless scalability causes many to move applications entirely to the public cloud,

butfor those who are still wary of the cloud, this scalability be exploited in another way: cloud

bursting. This deployment model allows an application to run primarily within a data center or private

cloud, and suddenly burst into the public cloud when the demand for computational resources

spikes. Designing a federated cloud in this way has many beneﬁts from an economic standpoint,

anddeploying BIG-IP VEs into this arrangement enables fast, seamless, geolocation-based

redirection of application users over secure SSL VPN connections. The user experience remains

unaected regardless of whether your application islocated on premises or in the Google Cloud.

IMPROVE PERFORMANCE AND AVAILABILITY WITH GLOBAL TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT

The ability to replicate applications throughout multiple geographical regions across the Google

Cloud empowers application owners to improve redundancy. It also reduces the physical distance

between an endpoint device and an application server, thus providing lower-latency access to

device users. Implementing BIG-IP® DNS Virtual Edition in your cloud network enables you to go

one step further, by using global server load balancing to make informed routing decisions based

on either the physical proximity of a server, or the real-time performance and health of a server.

Thisensures an optimized user application experience, regardless of the user’s location.

KEY FEATURES

• Consistent application services

across Google Cloud and

on-premises data center

• Web application security and

L4–7 DDoS protection

• Secure, policy-driven single

sign-on (SSO) and federated

access

• High availability of both Google

cloud-based and on-premises

applications

• SSL ooading and stateful L4–7

trac management

• Automation and programmability

tools

F5 APPLICATION DELIVERY SERVICES IN THE GOOGLE CLOUD

PROVIDE FEDERATED ACCESS TO YOUR GOOGLE CLOUD NETWORK

ANDAPPLICATIONS

Installing BIG-IP VEs into your hybrid cloud environment solves the problem of federating access,

network, and application resources across your data center and Google Cloud environments.

BIG-IP® Access Policy Manager® Virtual Edition (APM VE) uses Security Assertion Markup Language

(SAML) to enable web browser SSO, multi-factor authentication, geolocation restricted access,

anddevice inspection. SAML also eliminates the need to manage independent user accounts

across Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers.

OPTIMIZE AND SECURE GKE AND GKE ON-PREM CONTAINERS

Applications are being deployed in container environments more often to facilitate the

development of microservices and other modern application architectures. You can use F5

Container Ingress Services (CIS) in conjunction with BIG-IP Virtual Edition to provide north-south

ingress control, robust security, and performance optimization for containerized apps in GKE and

GKE On-Prem. CIS integrates natively with Kubernetes to automate app services insertion for

containers as they are created, so you can seamlessly move and scale your containers across

ahybrid architecture with consistent, advanced L4–7 app services. CIS is free, open-source,

andavailable on Docker Hub and GitHub.

BOOST DEPLOYMENT AGILITY IN THE GOOGLE CLOUD WITH AUTOMATION TOOLS

Deploying applications in the cloud should always be a fast, eortless process. However, this

is only achievable if the supporting application services can be fabricated in a similar fashion.

With F5-generated Google Deployment templates, the latest versions of BIG-IP VEs can be up

and running in your Google network in a matter of minutes. Using these templates, located in

F5’s GitHub repository, everything from the deployment of essential cloud resources to the

conﬁguration of the BIG-IP VE is performed autonomously in just a few clicks.

Alternatively, F5 iApps® Templates can rapidly conﬁgure BIG-IP VEs to best suit the requirements

of a speciﬁc application—based on a few simple checkbox inputs provided by the user. These

can then be re-used to conﬁgure any BIG-IP device to replicate the conﬁguration settings across

a hybrid-cloud architecture. In this way, iApps Templates reduce IT time consumption and ensure

policy consistency across your deployments.

©2019 F5 Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. F5, F5 Networks, and the F5 logo are trademarks of F5 Networks, Inc. in the U.S. and in certain other countries. Other F5 trademarks are identiﬁed at f5.com.

Any other products, services, or company names referenced herein may be trademarks of their respective owners with no endorsement or aliation, express or implied, claimed by F5.

DC0519 | JOB-CODE-343886356

IMPROVE EFFICIENCY OF GOOGLE CLOUD APPS WITH ADVANCED

PROGRAMMABILITY

F5 iControl® is an open web- based API that provides complete dynamic control of F5 conﬁguration

objects. You’ll have the power and ﬂexibility to ensure that applications and their underpinning

network—whether in the Google Cloud or in a data center—work together eciently to simplify

management of complex architectures. In addition, you can use the F5 iRules® scripting language

to provide complete programmatic access to trac ﬂowing between hybrid-cloud applications.

iRules allows you to inspect, analyze, and redirect trac entirely based on your custom ruleset.

ENJOY FLEXIBLE LICENSING AND CONSUMPTION MODELS

To better align with public cloud-based usage models, BIG-IP VE oers four dierent options that

give you the ﬂexibility to meet operational needs.

• Google’s Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) is available for those looking to leverage F5 application

delivery controller (ADC) services on a per-hour basis; this option is perfect for dev/test or

short-term projects.

• F5’s subscription licensing lets you purchase 1-, 2-, or 3-year BIG-IP VE license subscriptions

that can be deployed in any supported environment. You can self-license additional BIG-IP

VE licenses as needed with fees co-termed to a subscription contract period.

• F5’s Enterprise Licensing Agreement (ELA) provides you with the architectural ﬂexibility to

deploy however many VE’s you want, wherever you want, and whenever you want with no

retroactive penalties that can wreak havoc on budgets.

• F5’s bring-your-own-license (BYOL) option is a perpetual license that lets you amortize

acquisition costs over a longer period of time.

CONCLUSION

The process of migrating to, or developing in the Google Cloud can be greatly simpliﬁed and

accelerated with F5’s application delivery services—dramatically increasing security, performance,

and availability of applications. F5 provides a single application services tier for use across hybrid

cloud architectures, eliminating the need for multiple disparate solutions and the resulting IT strain.

This deployment approach enables enterprises to seamlessly and conﬁdently extend private data

centers into the cloud.

rightscale.com/blog/cloud-industry-insights/cloud-computing-trends-2016-state-cloud-survey

logicworks.com/blog/2016/08/vendor-lock-in-is-big-roadblock-to-cloud-success-survey-ﬁnds

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F5 AND THE GOOGLE CLOUD CAN

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