Cultural Shifts and the F5 Embrace of Open Source Technology

Why do 48 of the Fortune 50 companies use F5? Well it is because we ensure applications are fast, secure, and available.  Providing an exceptional product with world-class support has enabled F5 to dominate the ADC market for nearly a decade.

Over the past two years, F5 has embraced the shift to Software Defined Data Center architectures, and has actively partnered with many of the leading providers in the SDN networking space.  Software Defined Data Center architectures are both a major challenge and potentially an enormous opportunity for our customers.  F5 has sought to partner with all of the major players in this emerging space and has partnerships that will enable our joint customers to adopt more agile deployment models.

In addition to adopting SDDC architectures, F5 has now embarked on embracing major open source projects, most notably our OpenStack initiatives.  Over the past six months we have dedicated a team of Product Development Engineers, Architects, and Product Managers to develop supported plugins and essential supporting tools (HEAT) for the OpenStack platform.  Our goal is to upstream our LBaaS plugins and provide our customers with Day 0 support of our plugins, develop a broad ecosystem of validated solutions from both a platform and SDN perspective. We are also working to ensure a productized integration into OpenStack that is Open Source and available for enhancement by our customers and partners. The F5 embrace of OpenStack has been a major shift not only from a technical perspective but also culturally. To understand more fully some of the challenges F5 had to overcome in delivering a fully Open Source solution to our customers please check out the joint webinar recently conducted with our partner Plumgrid.

Our documentation, LBaaS plugins, supporting tools, and HEAT templates are now available on the F5 github site:

As always feedback and questions are encouraged!

Published Apr 14, 2016
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