F5 vs Open Source?

This is my personal philosophy on architecture / ADN design, which I've put into practice in various capacities. At the risk of this sounding like marketing fluff, one of the main ideas is to put an emphasis on a select set of strategic points of control in your network, then leverage the hell out of them. For me, this stack included the following technologies:

 

 

-- BigIP

 

-- Solaris (for Oracle)

 

-- NetApp

 

-- SLES Linux

 

-- The Apache/Tomcat stack

 

-- Commodity x64 servers, horizontally scaled

 

 

Obviously, there are tons of possible variations and valid arguments for/against this stack, but we found that using this simple stack we could address the vast majority of application delivery challenges that the business would toss our way. You can see the strategic points where we focused our capital investment: BigIP, NetApp, and Oracle.

 

 

Why? We found that using these specific technologies allowed us to say yes far more than no to the business owners, my boss(es), our CTO, etc.

 

 

With an open source solution in place at the BigIP layer, I can say with 100% certainty that I would have had to have made significant compromises to our application delivery environment, if not having to say "no" to a huge swath of use cases.

 

 

To blatantly rip off Larry Wall's famous quote: BigIP makes easy things easy and difficult things possible. With an open source LB solution this doesn't hold, particularly at scale: e.g., ask an open source solution to handle 1 million concurrent connections, let alone 32 million, or to 65,000 SSL TPS with 2048-bit keys. There are several reasons for this, but suffice it to say that there are (to me, at least) certain workloads and tasks that require purpose-built, high performance, kick-arse stuff. More and more, people are essentially asking for middleware on the wire, a task that BigIP is uniquely suited for.

 

 

Now, FWIW, I love open source and I've bet my career on it in many respects. But for me it's more about the right tool for the right job. F5 has a ton of *really* smart folks dedicated to making their technology do incredible things. It's a good idea to leverage that domain expertise for this type of job.

 

 

Just my $.02 on this interesting thread!

 

 

-- Matt