F5's next-generation cloud-native application delivery platform, rSeries, helps enterprises win in the future

Amid the global digitalization, the IT industry is welcoming a wave of application modernization, and countless companies are transforming traditional applications into modern applications through innovations in infrastructure, architecture design, application development, and application governance. However, in the process of transforming from traditional applications to modern applications, companies are often limited by resources and architecture, making the modernization of traditional applications both complex and expensive.

As a leader in multi-cloud application security and application delivery services, F5 has launched the next-generation application delivery controller (ADC) solution F5® rSeries to address the challenges and confusions encountered by enterprises in developing modern applications through cloud-native architectures. The solution uses a newly designed API-first platform that can meet the needs of both traditional and modern applications, bridging the gap between traditional and modern infrastructures. The new F5® rSeries provides unprecedented performance, a fully automated architecture, and ultra-high reliability, security, and access control for critical applications, helping users shorten time to market, integrate infrastructure, and protect critical data security on a large scale, quickly switch to an infrastructure that adapts to the needs of modern applications, and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) to ensure that application infrastructure meets future needs.

Excellent performance and scalability, efficient use of CPU resources

With the continued increase in remote workers, the continued expansion and rapid iteration of applications, video streaming, and the exponential growth of application traffic, global IT infrastructure resources are under increasing pressure and need to provide unprecedented performance and scalability. In addition, SSL/TLS encrypted traffic accounts for a large proportion of total application traffic, which further increases the pressure on IT resources and makes it impossible to effectively manage the increased load.

F5's new rSeries devices offer twice the performance of previous generations, more efficient CPU resource utilization, higher scalability, and industry-leading SSL/TLS processing scale to effectively manage and control the growing amount of application traffic. Supports performance expansion to twice that of previous platforms to address unpredictable performance requirements. In addition, avoid CPU exhaustion in critical use cases such as DDoS protection or UDP traffic processing. F5 rSeries uses a wider range of modern FPGA technology to more efficiently utilize CPU resources, providing unprecedented performance and higher scalability.

Supports cloud-native application deployment to meet multi-cloud DevOps requirements

As business demands continue to increase, the deployment and expansion speed of application services are facing unprecedented pressure. With an API-first architecture, F5® rSeries allows enterprises to leverage and implement CI/CD tool set integration, declarative APIs, and telemetry-based implementation without implementing a pure software infrastructure, facilitating multi-cloud automation of applications.

Specifically, users can use F5 Automation Toolchain to manage BIG-IP software based on F5 TMOS, and quickly load, configure, and deploy F5 application services through F5 Automation Toolchain's simple and powerful declarative interfaces, which minimize the need to master F5 knowledge, reduce errors, increase deployment speed, and improve workflow repeatability. The Automation Toolchain includes a unified set of REST API endpoints built with human-readable JSON standard documents that can be installed on BIG-IP or BIG-IQ in any environment that supports these solutions, making the configuration and deployment of F5 application delivery and security services faster, easier, and more programmatic.

Industry-leading encryption performance to provide security protection for applications

Cloud native brings unique challenges to application runtime security, and enterprises face ever-changing threats. In response, F5® rSeries provides the SSL capacity required to protect critical data (including hardware offload of enhanced elliptic curve algorithms (ECC)) and supports forward encryption extensions. By offloading costly SSL processing, key exchange and batch encryption are accelerated, achieving extraordinary SSL performance and accelerating SSL/TLS applications.

In addition, by adding SSL FPGA and hardware acceleration of ECC algorithms, F5® rSeries can achieve industry-leading encryption performance of up to 140K TPS P-256; with integrated one-way full-stack (three-layer to seven-layer) security, large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) defense, contextual access management and other functions, it provides the most effective protection for applications.

Unified platform and two licensing models to lower total cost of ownership

Since enterprise applications and security services are often deployed on different platforms, this usually means high procurement and usage costs. To address this pain point, F5 reduces total cost of ownership and infrastructure overhead by integrating applications and security services onto a unified high-performance platform.

F5 devices provide a unified and comprehensive set of application delivery services that can offload server loads and consolidate equipment, thereby saving data center management, power, space, and cooling costs, significantly reducing total cost of ownership while simplifying the network. The new F5® rSeries devices have excellent high performance and scalability, reducing the number of ADC devices required even when delivering the most demanding applications. By offloading compute-intensive processes to F5® rSeries devices, the number of application servers required is greatly reduced.

The F5® rSeries platform currently offers two different types of licensing models to meet the different business and budget requirements of users and achieve the highest cost-effectiveness for enterprises, including:

• Perpetual License : One-time purchase (capital expense) that lasts until the end of the product's useful life.

• Agile Usage Plans: 3-year subscription service that provides maximum architectural flexibility across hybrid environments, SaaS and managed services, effectively protecting annual budgets.

Application is a key step in digital transformation. How to make applications flexible, agile, and high-quality is the focus of current enterprise digital transformation. With the launch of F5® rSeries as a representative, F5 will continue to provide enterprises with leading products and solutions to help enterprises enter application modernization and win the battle of digital transformation.