F5: Hybrid cloud architecture behind the "Double Eleven" carnival

The total sales volume of the entire network reached 253.97 billion yuan, 1.38 billion packages were generated, and wireless device transactions accounted for more than 90%... At 00:00 on November 12, 2017, the annual "Double Eleven" online shopping carnival came to an end with such a shocking performance. After several years of leapfrog development, "Double Eleven" has evolved from an online shopping festival initiated by Tmall to a spectacle in the history of human science and technology and business. The wide range of industries involved, the large number of users covered, and the huge amount of money generated are enough to trigger overall thinking and innovation in the IT industry.

According to the data released by Alibaba, during the peak period of Double 11 in 2017, an average of 325,000 transactions were initiated per second, 256,000 payments were created per second, and 472 million real-time data were processed per second... It is not difficult to imagine that such a massive concurrent network behavior has posed a huge challenge not only to Tmall, but also to banks, operators, logistics companies and even large e-commerce companies. Mr. Zhang Yiqiang, General Manager of F5 China, a leading manufacturer in the application delivery field, believes that for such unprecedented network application behavior, in order to ensure that end users can get a better user experience, enterprises in all links must first prepare for the rainy day. Obviously, it is difficult for any enterprise's IT resources to cope with such sudden challenges, and it is not feasible to increase purchases temporarily from a cost perspective. Therefore, only by using the concept of hybrid cloud, pooling the enterprise's own data center and disaster recovery center, or temporarily migrating some applications to the public cloud for delivery, and delivering services in a more flexible way with the help of the cloud's nearly unlimited computing resources, can the user's purchase process be guaranteed to be smooth to the greatest extent. In order to help users deploy hybrid cloud environments more conveniently, F5 has begun to work in the fields of enterprise data center application delivery and cloud application delivery since 2016. On the one hand, through solutions such as F5pplication Connector, users can deploy and manage applications between private data centers and public clouds in a more intelligent and efficient way, thus solving the problem of cross-cloud application migration. In addition, F5 has also carried out in-depth cooperation with cloud service providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Huawei and even Alibaba to help enterprises use F5 application delivery solutions in public cloud environments, so that users can manage cross-cloud applications with more consistent strategies, so as to more easily face the huge application requests brought by events such as "Double Eleven".

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At the same time, as the special event of "Double Eleven" becomes more and more complex, more intermediate links mean more security risks may be hidden in it. On the one hand, consumers, as the protagonists of this event, enjoy shopping while the security of funds in each transaction will inevitably affect the entire purchase experience; on the other hand, when merchants launch various discounts, coupons, and flash sales, they are also worried about how to ensure that users get benefits, rather than speculators gain profits through technical means. Therefore, it is particularly important to be able to use an end-to-end application security chain in any environment, even in a hybrid cloud environment. Mr. Zhang Yiqiang pointed out that based on a deep understanding of application behavior, F5 has always been at the forefront of the application security field. Through F5's solutions, users can intelligently identify application behaviors, which is also the most different difference between F5 application security and traditional network security. For example, for traditional network security, microsecond-level flash sales cannot be quickly identified as non-compliant behavior; while security solutions from the application perspective can isolate or report them as suspicious behaviors, thereby largely avoiding improper profits through programs or robots. In addition, F5 not only launched targeted solutions for illegal activities such as page injection and phishing websites; users can even regard F5 devices as full proxy devices across environments, encrypting all information through F5 devices from the beginning of application requests until they are decrypted and processed on the F5 device at the service provider end. In this way, even if information leakage occurs in the process, the criminals will only intercept meaningless garbled codes, which protects the user's information and property security to the greatest extent.

Mr. Zhang Yiqiang said that it is still unknown how the "Double Eleven" will develop and what scale it will reach next year. The only thing that is clear is that next year there will be more companies from different industries, different forms and even different countries participating in it, and the combination of online and offline promotions has also begun to emerge this year. This means that "Double Eleven" will no longer be a platform or a shopping spree for netizens, but will evolve into a "phenomenal" event for all the people. The only thing that remains unchanged is that the support for this event will still be the network and IT. Therefore, if all parties involved can start from the idea of ​​application and deploy their own IT architecture, it will definitely bring a more exciting "Double Eleven" to the majority of users.