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Replacing and Augmenting F5 BIG-IP with NGINX Plus - EMEA
- 1. Replacing and Augmenting F5 BIG-IP with NGINX Plus
- 2. Leif Beaton Senior Solutions Architect, NGINX Formerly: • Sales Engineer, McAfee • Sales Engineer, Quest Software Who am I?
- 3. What is NGINX? Internet Web Server Serve content from disk Reverse Proxy FastCGI, uWSGI, gRPC… Load Balancer Caching, SSL termination… HTTP traffic - Basic load balancer - Content Cache - Web Server - Reverse Proxy - SSL termination - Rate limiting - Basic authentication NGINX Open Source NGINX Plus + Advanced load balancer + Health checks + Session persistence + Least time alg + Cache purging + HA/Clustering
- 4. Agenda • Introduction • Five industry points that are disrupting F5 • Three options to gracefully move away from F5 • Beyond F5 • Customer success story: AppNexus • Summary
- 5. F5 Company Info • Founded: 1996 • Headquarters: Seattle, WA, USA • CEO: François Locoh-Donou • Ticker: FFIV • Customers: 22,500 (Gartner Magic Quadrant, ADC 2016) • IPO: 1999, $10/share • Annual Revenue: $2B • CMV: $179.20 • Market Cap: $10.791B 5 F5.com, circa 1997 Source: web.archive.org
- 6. The Rise of F5 6 "Large-capacity servers are so expensive today that many companies are unable to justify the additional cost and are left with unreliable, slow sites. With BIG/ip, a System Administrator can add lower cost servers to the Web site and achieve outstanding price/performance.” - Jeff Hussey, Founder of F5 Labs, 1997 Source: web.archive.org/web/19971013115526/http://www.f5.com:80/release1.htm
- 7. Today F5 is Struggling • F5 FY2018 numbers good on surface, but digging deeper shows cracks: ◦ Product revenue down 0.5% year over year ◦ Within product revenue, systems revenue down 4% year over year ◦ Product revenue < Services revenue • What does this mean? ◦ People are not buying new F5 BIG-IP hardware like they used to ◦ People are holding onto existing F5 BIG-IP longer than standard 3-5 year refresh cycle ◦ F5 being propped up by existing support contracts 7 “The number of recent [F5] executive departures is alarming.” –Jason Ader, Analyst, William Blair, 2015
- 8. Agenda • Introduction • Five industry points that are disrupting F5 • Three options to gracefully move away from F5 • Beyond F5 • Customer success story: AppNexus • Summary
- 9. Five Industry Points Disrupting F5 1. Public Cloud 2. DevOps 3. Commodity Hardware 4. Open Source 5. Microservices 9 “The market is moving away from [F5], and is not coming back.” –Trip Chowdry, Analyst, Global Equities Research
- 10. Point 1: Public Cloud Where F5 comes up short: • SaaS companies taking business, no need to load balance Exchange servers if using Office 365 • More expensive than hardware appliances, don’t want to cannibalize hardware sales • 5 Gbps throughput limit with pre-built AMIs • Throughput limits requires license upgrade, can’t scale up or down as needed 10 “We need to manage applications on top of any infrastructure platform, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and other cloud platform providers. NGINX Plus provides us the flexibility to deliver applications across different infrastructure options.” – Nate Johnson, CEO and Founder at Reliam Why NGINX Plus is the better choice: • Biggest NGINX Plus customers are SaaS companies • NGINX Plus is cloud-native software • 40% AWS deployments use NGINX • No throughput limits, site licensing to scale up and down as needed
- 11. Point 2: DevOps Where F5 comes up short: • Takes weeks to resolve IT tickets to get a simple application update deployed • Still very manual process of stepping through UI • VLANS, IPs, and other networking config exposed for each virtual server 11 “It takes 2 weeks to get an F5 modification from the networking team. You know how long it takes us to change NGINX? It takes 30 seconds to make the change in GitHub, and then we run the Ansible script. Ta-da, production.” – Engineer at large telco company Why NGINX Plus is the better choice: • Fully automatable, no need to file IT tickets • Works with all DevOps tools • No VLANs or IPs per virtual server
- 12. Point 3: Commodity Hardware Where F5 comes up short: • No bare metal option, VMs only • Custom hardware 6x the cost of equivalent commodity server • x86 support only • Custom hardware takes longer to procure • Custom hardware leads to overprovisioning to avoid costly mid-refresh cycle upgrade 12 “In the past when faced with a failure, we had to wait for replacement hardware and hope it arrived before another failure. Now with NGINX, we have much more flexibility. If a machine fails we can quickly and seamlessly replace it, because our reliance on hardware has been significantly reduced.” – Matt Blaha, Sr. Systems Engineer at Discovery Education Why NGINX Plus is the better choice: • Can run bare metal • Commodity hardware 1/6 the cost of custom hardware • X86, ARM64, and PPC support • Commodity hardware readily available • Able to right size the deployment using commodity hardware
- 13. Point 4: Open Source Where F5 comes up short: • Not part of open source ecosystem • No community support • Closed source means tied to F5 success or failure 13 “In a future that includes competition from open source, we can expect that the eventual destiny of any software technology will be to either die or become part of the open infrastructure itself.” – Eric S Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, 1997 Why NGINX Plus is the better choice: • Key play in open source ecosystem • Wealth of community resources and contributions • Purchase protection, NGINX Open Source lives on regardless of NGINX, Inc.
- 14. Point 5: Microservices Where F5 comes up short: • No container option • No true Kubernetes Ingress Controller solution • Heavyweight, not portable 14 “As we moved to microservices we’ve realized that we needed a much smarter way of routing pages to our applications… We realized that NGINX Plus, with its better support, with its DNS resolving, and the advanced metrics that we get now is the way forward. NGINX Plus allowed us to get to the final mile.” – John Cleveley, former Senior Engineering Manager, Buzzfeed Why NGINX Plus is the better choice: • Can run in containers, top downloaded application on Docker Hub • Supported Kubernetes Ingress Controller • Lightweight and portable
- 15. Agenda • Introduction • Five industry points that are disrupting F5 • Three options to gracefully move away from F5 • Beyond F5 • Customer success story: AppNexus • Summary
- 16. 1. NGINX Plus Behind F5 16 • Easiest way to introduce NGINX Plus into your network • F5 layer 4 load balances to NGINX Plus • Can start small with one application being behind NGINX Plus and then expand
- 17. 2. NGINX Plus Alongside F5 17 • Parallel NGINX Plus deployment • Good architecture if adopting public cloud while still keeping private datacenter • Can also start small with one application being behind NGINX Plus and then expand
- 18. 3. NGINX Plus Instead of F5 18 • F5 completely decommissioned, use NGINX Plus for all load balancing • Previous 2 architectures are intermediaries to this eventual goal
- 19. Agenda • Introduction • Five industry points that are disrupting F5 • Three options to gracefully move away from F5 • Beyond F5 • Customer success story: AppNexus • Summary
- 20. Micro Load Balancers 20 • Load balancer per application • Configuration stored along with application in GitHub • Fully portable
- 21. Kubernetes Ingress Controller 21 • NGINX commonly used as Ingress Controller • F5 has Ingress Controller solution, but it is just a container that reprograms F5 BIG-IP hardware
- 22. API Gateway 22 • 40% of deploy NGINX instances are used as API gateway • Capital One handles 12 billion transactions per day with NGINX API gateway • F5 BIG-IP cannot easily be used as an API gateway
- 23. Introducing NGINX Controller Centralized monitoring and management for NGINX Plus • Alerting • API management • Configuration analysis • Customizable dashboards • Load balancer management • Monitoring Learn more: nginx.com/products/nginx-controller
- 24. Agenda • Introduction • Five industry points that are disrupting F5 • Three options to gracefully move away from F5 • Beyond F5 • Customer success story: AppNexus • Summary
- 25. Moving to the next generation of F5 hardware was going to cost more than $1M per data center. NGINX Plus gave us 50% more transactions per server, for one-sixth the price. We’re now 100% hardware free. 25 “ -- Senior Networking Leader, AppNexus “ ROI
- 26. Agenda • Introduction • Five industry points that are disrupting F5 • Three options to gracefully move away from F5 • Beyond F5 • Customer success story: AppNexus • Summary
- 27. Summary • F5 BIG-IP is the ageing veteran of the tech industry. • The market has moved away from F5, and they have not kept up • Three ways to replace F5 BIG-IP with NGINX Plus • Replacing F5 with NGINX Plus opens up new architectures such as API gateway • AppNexus saved over 50% while getting the benefits of a software solution by replacing F5 with NGINX Plus
- 28. Download our Free White Paper 28 • A brief history of F5 Networks and the BIG-IP, from initial release to early success • Five industry trends that are disrupting F5 and making F5 BIG-IP a hindrance to the modern enterprise looking for agility • Three ways to gracefully replace or augment F5 BIG-IP with NGINX Plus without rip and replace • About application architectures possible with NGINX Plus, but not with BIG-IP, like API gateways Download now: nginx.com/resources/library/replacing- augmenting-f5-nginx-plus/
- 29. Q & ATry NGINX Plus and NGINX WAF free for 30 days: nginx.com/free-trial-request