2018 F5 China Application Service Summit Forum was grandly held to share useful coping services in a multi-cloud environment

[51CTO.com original article] At 9:00 am on May 22, the "2018 F5 China Application Service Summit Forum" was grandly held at the New Yunnan Crowne Plaza Hotel in Beijing. This forum is not only one of F5's important annual events in China, but also the "Cannes Film Festival" in the field of application delivery: in addition to many senior executives and top experts from F5, it also gathered senior researchers in the field of application delivery, important partners of F5, technology giants from different industries, and corporate representative practitioners. Nearly 700 people attended the venue to listen to the keynote speech of the conference.

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What kind of application services are needed in the era of application economy?

In his opening speech, Huang Yanwen, President of F5 Greater China, said that 10 years ago, China's e-commerce transaction volume accounted for about 1% of the global e-commerce transaction volume, but now it accounts for 44%, which shows that China's economy is taking off very fast. Applications, as an important engine for digital economic growth, have led China into the era of application economy. He talked about the 2018 application delivery report, in which F5 found that most companies are beginning to try to operate applications on multi-cloud platforms and multi-cloud environments. At the same time, more than half of the security incidents are currently locked on applications. Therefore, it can be seen that in the era of application economy, providing high-quality application services is becoming more and more important. "F5 hopes to continue to bring higher-performance, smarter, and more secure application services to Chinese customers from now on."

Adam Judd, senior vice president of sales for Asia Pacific, Greater China and Japan at F5, was the first speaker at the conference. His speech was titled "The Journey to the Application Economy". He first marveled at the rapid development and investment in China's application economy. In his view, applications are the engine driving the digital economy, and China is leading the development of the application economy. He saw a piece of news that was very representative: In May this year, news reports said that Tianjin will set up a new generation of artificial intelligence industry fund in the next few years, with a scale of 100 billion yuan, about 16 billion US dollars. In sharp contrast, the entire European Union's artificial intelligence budget for the next five years is only 2 billion US dollars, and China is still increasing its investment.

Zhu Ande also brought out a set of data to prove that the application economy is growing explosively: China currently has 750 million Internet users, most of whom access the Internet through mobile phones. On average, each person has 100 applications installed on their mobile phone, and spends about 2 hours and 40 minutes on applications, while the global average number of APP installations is about 60. "China's application economy is different from the rest of the world and has its own distinct characteristics. In 2009, Apple created a phrase - there is always an application that can meet your needs, and now there are 2.2 million applications in the world. The digital economy era makes your world centered on applications," he said.

Then he began to focus on the value and role of applications in the enterprise market. It is reported that there are currently 260 million application processes in the world, and it is expected to increase fivefold by 2022. The average number of applications per enterprise is about 200, and employees use 1-12 enterprise office applications every day. Of course, with the abundance of applications, the application operating environment has become more complex, and 53% of security attacks are concentrated in the application layer. "Against this backdrop, people's demand for coping services is also changing, and they have higher requirements for application performance, security, compliance, visibility, and availability."

In his speech, Zhu Ande mentioned that when enterprise applications begin to enter a multi-cloud environment, they will face four typical challenges: first, how to provide consistent security policies for all enterprise applications, second, how to protect applications from threats, third, how to optimize application performance, and fourth, how to fully understand the application status. "F5 is committed to providing customers with better application services, including consistent security policies and comprehensive protection of business applications, protection of applications from threats, and visualization and monitoring of application performance optimization and application health."

At the end of his speech, Zhu Ande once again emphasized F5's emphasis on the Chinese market. He said that F5 is committed to establishing a test R&D center in Beijing, developing local talents in China, and launching new solutions suitable for the Chinese market. "F5 hopes to enable China's R&D and testing centers to play a leading role in global development and testing." Finally, he concluded his speech with the Chinese word "win-win".

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F5 shares new ideas - how to make applications controllable, visible and manageable in a multi-cloud environment

F5 Greater China Chief Technology Officer Wu Jingtao also delivered a keynote speech entitled "The Road to Application Services". As the chief technology officer, he systematically introduced F5's future plans from the perspectives of F5's development history, application delivery technology trends, and application service technology implementation. "The development direction of the application service road is very clear, and the future must be completed by hardware + software + cloud services."

He made it clear that F5 hopes to continue to play a leading role in the market in the future and provide application services in a multi-cloud environment. He emphasized that F5 will focus on five aspects. First, the large hardware for north-south traffic. F5 will continue to sell high-performance hardware equipment to ensure the reliability and stability of north-south traffic; second, F5 will also focus on the internal traffic of the data center and provide multi-VE products for east-west traffic; third, F5 can already achieve DevOps probe-free and realize cloud application visualization through DevOps application middleware; fourth, provide customer experience customization and optimization services for mobile Internet; fifth, AI Ops application control network, let application manage network.

Wu Jingtao revealed that the third and fifth points will be the technical fields that F5 will pay more attention to, namely DevOps probeless application middleware and AI OPS. "This is not only F5's new idea in the field of application services, but it has also been put into practice and has received very good feedback from customers."

"When application traffic is visible, manageable, and controllable in a multi-cloud environment, it also means that F5 has opened up a new space for application services." Wu Jingtao believes that when traffic becomes transparent in F5 software and hardware devices, F5 can use the traffic information it has to make user experience judgments, user behavior analysis, and application performance management. It can even use financial language to talk about DC operations and KPI analysis. For example, the work report of data center operation and maintenance personnel is no longer boring, "how many servers have been purchased, how much capacity has been expanded, and how many customers have been served", but becomes more convincing conclusions such as "how much the application service experience has been improved, how many users have been brought in, how many users have stayed on the product, and how much sales have been brought in".

Wu Jingtao's example resonated with many people at the scene. One participant told the reporter that he was an enterprise operation and maintenance personnel, and his biggest headache was quantifying his work. The scenario described by Wu Jingtao was really attractive to the network operation and maintenance department.

At the end of his speech, Wu Jingtao shared F5's "ABCDE" in 2018, which was to use "AI Ops" and machine learning, using F5 as the network data engine of "BigData" to achieve visualization of "DevOps" and improve "user Experience" in a "Cloud" environment, winning applause from the audience.

F5 Localization

This year's "2018 F5 China Application Service Summit" had a large number of participants. During the more than three hours of speeches in the morning, many people stood to listen to the entire speech due to insufficient seats. Outside the venue, the booths of F5 partners such as Shenzhou Cloud Testing, Shangrong Cloud, and N-Compass attracted many participants to consult and communicate.

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F5 invited 9 sponsors this time. Except for AWS and VMware, the others are local companies, such as Huawei, a Chinese technology giant. This also proves the importance of the Chinese market mentioned by Zhu Ande, and F5's determination to promote localization strategy. The Analects of Confucius says, "If you want to establish yourself, help others to establish themselves; if you want to succeed, help others to succeed." In the future, F5 will surely create a new pattern of "win-win" in China.

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