3 Things You Didn't Know About BIG-IP

1. BIG-IP is not hardware. 

Oh, I know, F5 delivers BIG-IP on hardware that's called BIG-IP XXXX so really, what's the difference?

BIG-IP is a product family, a brand if you will. It's a way to identify that "these products are related" and go together. We could call it just the XXX hardware platform, but because it's specifically designed to enhance BIG-IP software, it kind of makes sense to group them together under the same name. I mean, it's not like you're going to deploy anything other than BIG-IP software on BIG-IP hardware, right?

But you might (and probably will) deploy BIG-IP software in a virtual form factor (we support all major hypervisors - Citrix, VMware, KVM, Microsoft) - or in a cloud like AWS, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure or VMware vCloud Air. That's because the BIG-IP software is not reliant on BIG-IP hardware. Oh, it benefits from BIG-IP hardware because the hardware is designed to enhance the performance and scale of the BIG-IP software but it's not a requirement. The BIG-IP software is enhanced by, not dependent on, BIG-IP hardware. 

And software it is. With over 15 years of development, it's a significant piece of software. And most of that code is dedicated to TMOS and the modules from which our application services are ultimately delivered. Some of the code is specific to BIG-IP hardware, in order to eke out the most performance and scale out of the system, but that code is abstracted enough that the bulk of the software is deployable just about anywhere.

But that doesn't mean you have to pair the two together. You can certainly enjoy the benefits of BIG-IP software (which include the extensibility of any other software platform) without simultaneously employing the use of BIG-IP hardware.

2. BIG-IP is not just a load balancer.

I know, surprise right? Granted, BIG-IP is almost universally synonymous with load balancing because that's where we started and well, it's really uber awesome at load balancing. But that's just one service out of a large (and growing) number of services available for BIG-IP. That's because BIG-IP is not just software, it's a software platform. And platforms are meant to be extended. In the case of BIG-IP that's through software modules that deliver one or more application services. BIG-IP APM (Access Policy Manager), for example,  offers not only SSL-VPN services but cloud identity federation services and application access control as well as identity services and protocol gateway services.

I will not deluge you with a complete list, but trust me that there are a plethora of services spanning device, network and application foci to choose from. And the list keeps growing. For example, just this past year we added secure web and HTTP/2 gateway services. Because it's a platform, not a product. 

BIG-IP software is based on a full-proxy architecture, meaning its got a dual stack - one for the client-side and one for the app-side. That gives it tremendous flexibility in how it can interact with application traffic and data. Sure, it can load balance the heck out of your apps like nobodies business (and with more efficacy and intelligence than any other solution out there) but it can also do just about anything an app can do, too because the separation of the stacks means it is, technically, an app itself. It's an endpoint, just like your app server.

Now, you can't write just anything and deploy it on BIG-IP software because the platform is for us to use to develop new services. But you can write code that runs within the context of any service and interact with the platform to gather statistics, change behavior and call out to other services to share or gather information important to the app or the service itself.

That's a far sight more than just a "load balancer", isn't it?

3. BIG-IP delivers application services which are not the same as application networking services.

I know this might seem pedantic, but it's an important distinction that needs to be made sooner rather than later. I'm not going to diagram sentences to explain this one, but when we say "application services" we mean "services for applications." When you say "application networking services" you are saying "networking services for applications". There's a big difference there in what that ultimately means. Networking services are those that connect, transport, and secure network traffic. When they're focused on applications it means that those services are acting on behalf of applications.

When we say "application services" we're talking about intermediate services that reside in the data path and offer application-specific functionality. Web application security, for example, must (if it's going to have any degree of efficacy) be application-specific. It's not just about transporting traffic from point A to point B, it's about performing a service on behalf of the application that improves its security, availability or performance. They aren't "networking" in the traditional sense that networking is about routing and switching and firewalling. They are networking in that they operate at the upper layers (4-7) of the OSI network stack. But operationally they are targeted applications themselves (see #1 above) that just happen to be located "in" the network because it makes sense to topologically deploy those services upstream from the application.

After all, when the point of a service is to prevent bad requests from consuming resources unnecessarily or compromising an application it makes sense to ensure that process happens before the request actually gets to the application.

Yes, BIG-IP also provides some application networking services, like acting as a protocol transition point - from SPDY or HTTP/2 to HTTP/1 and vice versa or from IPv4 to IPv6 and its reverse or from VXLAN to VLAN to NVGRE or whatever combination of SDN overlay protocol you're looking to use. But the bulk of services delivered by a BIG-IP are application services. No additional modifier required.