F5 Greater China Chief Technology Officer Wu Jingtao: Probeless real-time application big data collection engine implementation and AIOps realization

[51CTO.com original article] Recently, the WOT2019 Global Artificial Intelligence Technology Summit kicked off on time at the Beijing Yuecai JW Marriott Hotel. As a well-known summit for offline exchanges among global technical personnel in 2019, this conference focused on three core chapters: general technology, application fields, and enterprise empowerment. More than 60 first-line AI experts from around the world gathered together to share thematic technical content such as deep learning, neural networks, visual technology, unmanned driving, machine learning, algorithm models, and knowledge graphs with more than a thousand participants.

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On the second day of the conference, at the AIOps sub-forum, Wu Jingtao, Chief Technology Officer of F5 Greater China, was invited to deliver a keynote speech on "The implementation of probeless real-time application big data collection engine and AIOps realization". After the meeting, he was interviewed by 51CTO reporters. He emphasized that if customers use F5 as a probeless application visualization data source, then F5 can bring customers three aspects of help: first, help in operation and maintenance, such as realizing application visualization, user behavior analysis, performance management and other functions. Secondly, in terms of business, F5 can help the IT department of an enterprise to achieve many cutting-edge operations, turning the impossible into possible, such as real-time risk control in financial institutions, probeless real-time data sources for anti-money laundering and other businesses, and upgrading and transformation of traditional businesses. The most important is the help in AI. It is difficult for traditional customers to perform truly fully automated operations on AIOps because they are limited by the real-time nature of data collection, the accuracy of data analysis, network management and the limitations of arbitrary grayscale application routing control technology, but F5 can help customers solve these problems in an all-round way.

F5 Unified Application Service Platform truly realizes DevOps visualization

Wu Jingtao said that in the entire DevOps process, in order to achieve rapid iteration, any version and any problem between infrastructures should be discovered quickly, but in fact this is difficult to do. In the past, simple IT operation and management were achieved by detecting between devices through probes, but the efficiency was not high and the perception of application status was extremely limited. Today, the application infrastructure is no longer a triple architecture of Web/App/DB, but an API architecture. It is difficult for IT personnel to capture the call logic of a certain application, so it is even more impossible to monitor applications, discover problems, and judge problems.

So how does F5 solve this problem? This depends on F5's powerful TMOS architecture, which places the user's request and the server's response in two different TCPs, and installs a dual-stack architecture in front of each application. In this way, F5 becomes the network middle key of DevOps, between the WEB and the APP, and can monitor all data passing through the API service without any probes, which is very helpful for the main key business.

"F5 will be deployed in the cloud in the form of soft load and virtual application services." Wu Jingtao introduced that F5 will package the soft load and virtual application services. The development department controls the packaged network services, while the network department still controls the delivery services in the form of hardware, and uses the soft load as a flexible extension in the cloud to form a unified delivery platform.

Wu Jingtao divides the value brought to customers into four categories: one is user/network experience monitoring, two is user behavior analysis, three is application performance management, and four is DC operation in financial language.

F5 surprises customers at every turn

At the scene, Wu Jingtao not only talked in depth about the technical architecture, but also shared with the audience the application of these innovations of F5 in large enterprise customers. Taking F5's probeless technology as an example, a customer's platform was built 5 years ago. Many core business systems are outdated, but no changes can be made. In addition, the business and IT-related personnel have changed a lot, and the original files are no longer found. So how to do risk control for this system? F5's probeless technology comes in handy. There is no need to transform the business or change the system. Just add a real-time risk control system to the system. F5 first uses a script to open the real-time message, then decodes it according to the real-time message content, and re-encodes it according to the new business. The operation and maintenance personnel are no longer just the role of operation and maintenance, but can contribute the value of the application. It really builds a new platform between the system department, network department, host department, development department, and test department, so that all businesses can penetrate and create enough correlations between IT and technology.

In addition, Wu Jingtao also mentioned AIOps. He said that people often regard AIOps as real-time streaming data, as well as the collection and display of device data. In fact, this is incomplete. F5 hopes to continue learning through the results of analysis, and then make real-time adjustments to online applications immediately after the results of root cause analysis. He believes that after people get data through AIOps, they can form an intelligent baseline through machine learning and automatically generate a call relationship of application logic, which can make intelligent judgments and processing before the customer application has a problem alarm, greatly improving the user experience.

The Application Service Technology Elite Academy has started classes!

At the end of his speech, Wu Jingtao formally recommended F5's Application Service Technology Elite Academy to the audience. F5's Application Service Technology Elite Academy brings together a group of outstanding talents such as F5's architects, senior industry analysts, and key account managers. They all played the role of martial arts heroes, and taught the application service secrets for multi-cloud environments from multiple angles and from the shallow to the deep in the form of videos. The video courses cover three major areas: multi-cloud multi-active, application security, and AI-Ops automatic operation and maintenance, and the content covers five major scenarios: finance, telecommunications, government & enterprise, high-tech, and new retail. At present, F5 Application Service Technology Elite Academy has logged in to the 51 Academy Zone and has begun formal external promotion.

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When asked by reporters why he chose this "presentation method", Wu Jingtao said that he discovered the value of videos very early on. Speaking eloquently for half an hour is not as good as showing customers a five-minute demonstration in the video. "At that time, I was thinking, why not turn F5's most complex technology and the most obscure content into a short video with in-depth and easy-to-understand content so that more people can learn it?"

As a result, F5's architects and product managers became the leaders and knights of the arena. They started with the most basic application delivery content, extended to cutting-edge application services, and topics of concern to large enterprise users, and finally created a systematic and logically clear elite academy, which was very popular as soon as it was launched. Wu Jingtao revealed that even F5's sales staff would save a lot of videos on their mobile phones, and choose different videos to play for customers based on their focus, which not only helped customers to more intuitively feel the value of F5's solutions, but also virtually attracted countless fans to the lecturers.

[51CTO original article, please indicate the original author and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]