Today at its annual EMEA Agility partner and customer conference, F5 Networks announced the availability of offerings designed to provide consistent application services in multi-cloud environments-giving companies greater deployment flexibility, more effective security, and faster time to market.

F5's 2017 State of Application Delivery report shows that while more customers than ever are shifting to cloud infrastructures, many are consciously choosing to invest in multiple cloud technologies. Eighty percent of survey respondents report that they are committed to multi-cloud architectures, and 20 percent state that they will have over half their applications running in the public and/or private clouds this year. With this move to leverage multi-cloud environments, unexpected hurdles often present themselves: application deployments across multiple cloud platforms create challenges in managing application services; inconsistent security policies create compliance risks; and multiple cloud architectures put more pressure on IT skills gaps, and diminish the return on the cloud's value.

"Customers are increasingly choosing to deploy applications in multiple clouds-public and private, in colocation facilities, and in their own data centers-but are struggling with the management of different development environments, tool sets, and orchestration technologies," said Sangeeta Anand, SVP of Product Management and Product Marketing at F5. "Where these clouds provide services for applications, they often do so in ways that are not portable enough, are use-case specific, or provide inadequate protection. F5's portfolio of multi-cloud application services and solutions gives customers the freedom to deploy any application-anywhere-with consistent application services and enterprise-grade security."

Extending the Reach of Applications and the Cloud

In November, F5 shared its vision to power intelligent application services in the cloud with the stability, security, and performance customers expect. Today, we build on that foundation with the broad availability of solutions for multi-platform, multi-cloud services that make applications go faster, smarter, and safer.

New public cloud solutions help deploy applications faster in any cloud

• F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition in the Google Cloud means that organizations can now deploy F5 services in all major public clouds. F5 gives customers greater choices of cloud platforms, with new ‘bring your own license' offers for instances ranging from 25 Mbps to 5 Gbps. Available now from Google Cloud Launcher in Good, Better, and Best versions.
• Cloud solution templates for Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google reduce the complexity of deploying F5 services for applications in the public cloud. These new solution-specific templates simplify and automate common public cloud use cases. Cloud solution templates are also available for OpenStack private cloud environments. Available now on GitHub.
• Integrated marketplace solutions provide easily accessible, pre-packaged F5 services such as WAF and Office 365 federated access that are deployable directly from public cloud marketplaces, meaning companies can leverage their trusted F5 services easily for applications in the cloud. Available now in the Azure Marketplace.

New private cloud solutions enable organizations to move to the cloud faster and with more confidence

• A private cloud solution package gets customers up and running quickly with pre-tested, certified, and bundled F5 solutions that simplify and automate OpenStack private cloud deployments. Available now through F5 sales.

Broad line of additional solutions deliver application services in new environments

• Lightweight Application Services Proxy gives customers flexibility in developing, testing, and scaling applications in container environments. Available now at Docker Store.
• Container Connector provides the easy deployment of app services in containerized environments, and simple integration of capabilities into management/orchestration systems including Kubernetes and Mesos/Marathon. Available now at GitHub and Docker Hub.
• Application Connector inserts application services from the edge of the public cloud and securely connects any public cloud provider to the customer's interconnection or data center. In the case of AWS, Application Connector can automatically discover workloads for application services insertion. Available now through F5 sales.

All F5 multi-cloud products are available today, with individual details above.

"Business executives are beginning to rely heavily on cloud solutions in support of their digital transformation efforts, but in many cases, single cloud deployments are insufficient to enable true business agility," said Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research. "Unfortunately, multi-cloud frameworks are complex and IT must take the steps needed to mitigate the challenges of operating in these mixed worlds. With F5's multi-cloud portfolio of products, IT can deliver consistent and secure application services in any environment needed for business velocity."