F5
F5 has become the key partner to customers looking to transform into digital businesses , a process that the pandemic has accelerated exponentially . We talk to F5 EVP and CTO Geng Lin .
When F5 started in 1996 , it was primarily focused on shaping the online environment for the gaming industry . As a pioneer in loadbalancing , it quickly found a horizontal niche in helping its clients target applications to scale . Businesses could now grow at the pace of users without redesigning applications and redeploying their infrastructures . F5 focused on helping enterprises to scale data center workloads mainly composed of traditional three-tier web architectures . Leveraging the load balancer ’ s position in the data path of the target applications , F5 also expanded its products into the area of application security with capabilities such as application access management and firewalls .
As businesses started to virtualize their environments , F5 evolved to help its clients navigate the new reality . Moving to
a public cloud environment introduced further challenges for enterprises . F5 ' s virtualized application delivery controller made it possible to detach application load-balancing and application security functions from the hardware environment , enabling customers ' workloads to move into a public cloud environment . This solution appealed to the CIO community as it preserved its operational procedures , configuration , and integration points with the tools and applications already in place .
The brave new world of adaptive applications Since 2018 , business has been swiftly moving into a world of microservices . F5 ' s “ sweet spot ” in helping organizations scale and protect their applications has extended to enabling better developer-oriented
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