New Cisco ACI F5 Integration Optimizes Application Performance in Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Environments

It’s a regular chorus I hear from our customers, that hybrid multi-cloud is a forever reality—most often by choice, but also by organic, unplanned growth as well as acquisitions and mergers. And as hybrid multi-cloud enables flexibility, F5 and Cisco help address the significant complexity and risk that can accompany it.

Our strategic partnership with Cisco is more important than ever. We are aligned in our vision to collaborate on solutions and integrations that target hybrid multi-cloud challenges. I’m proud of what we’ve done together so far around security, which includes improving secure access and laying a foundation for zero trust principles for so many enterprises around the world (including F5), and improving customer ROI with better Cisco firewall speeds and efficiency. And of course, our popular integration between BIG-IP and Cisco ACI has made it possible for app owners to deliver on their promises of availability and performance, enabled through new visibility into application health and centralized management that’s natively integrated with Cisco ACI APIC using the F5 ACI ServiceCenter app.

And now I’m excited for the next evolution in our partnership with Cisco: global server load balancing across sites. We are introducing an F5 BIG-IP DNS integration with Cisco ACI Multi-Site/Multi-Pod. This is essential for organizations who rely on multiple sites to bring apps in-location to users for the best performance and experience, and as a result need more sophisticated rerouting capabilities to reliably serve a global, distributed audience.

Together, F5 and Cisco are empowering network and application teams with the solutions they need to ensure apps are available and performing under any circumstances—from overloaded servers to down sites—and can operate successfully in hybrid and multi-cloud models. In turn, organizations can keep volume requests safely flowing and users productive. Validated joint use cases for enhanced network visibility across BIG-IP and ACI, including network configuration, integrating F5 services into the ACI fabric, and end-to-end automation and orchestration, are all widely used.

The latest joint F5-Cisco solution guide explains the new integration in detail and provides multiple validated design options to support a wide range of enterprise requirements around application performance and resiliency. In addition, once BIG-IP DNS is in your environment, there is a host of capabilities you can unlock including superior DNS performance, more layers of security, reporting and analytics, and health monitoring.

Please check out the article on the new integration and let us know what you think. This is one step of many, and I look forward to our partnership continuing to pave the way for more hybrid multi-cloud success for our customers.