f5 architecture

 

Definitely everyone (don't call me Shirley!) At least have been exposed to THE CLOUD by now. Whether it's "I will go with interest" "to the cloud!" advertising or down in the nuts and bolts of hypervisors and programmatic interfaces for automation, the buzz has been around for a while. One of F5's cloud computing experts and extraordinary blogger (among many other talents) Lori MacVittie, constantly weighs in on events and positioning in the cloud computing space. F5 has a smart and evil talent with experience in the cloud and dynamic data center spaces, and we make perfectly positioned products for both worlds. With the release of all our product modules on BIG-IP VE last year, it has given the DevCentral team the opportunity to rise from evangelizers of our amazing products to customers as well. And with this opportunity, we have taken the DevCentral bull forward into our new virtual data centers in Bluelock.

f5 architecture

Theoretical verification

We spoke to a couple of different providers during the selection period for a cloud provider. We chose Bluelock for a couple of main reasons. First, their influential leadership in the cloud space through CTO Pat O'Day. Second, their strong partnership with other VMware partners and their use of VMware's vCloud Director platform. This was a good solution for us, as our production BIG-IP VE products are designed for ESX hypervisors (and others in limited configurations, please refer to the supported hypervisor matrix). As part of the selection process, Bluelock created a temporary virtual data center to experiment with. Our initial goal was just to run the application with minimal infrastructure and test its performance. The biggest concerns were with database performance in a virtual server as the DevCentral application platform, DotNetNuke, is heavy for queries. The hardest thing about getting the application was putting the files into the environment. Once the files were installed and BIG-IP VE licensed, we were up and running in less than a day. We captured, analyzed the stats, and literally without modification, the application ran within 10% of our production baseline on dedicated servers / infrastructure. It was an extraordinary success.