F5 Networks DevCentral Online Community Site Improves Performance and Agility with Bluelock Virtual Datacenters

• Cybersecurity & Privacy - Cloud Security
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Public Cloud

• Telecommunications

• Discrete Manufacturing
• Product Research & Development

• Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
• Cybersecurity Services
• System Integration

F5 Networks, a Seattle-based application delivery networking vendor, runs a technical user community site called DevCentral. This site is a platform where over 100,000 global IT professionals collaborate with peers to enhance and create solutions to better deliver applications. DevCentral is a key competitive differentiator for F5, the recognized market share and innovative leader in its space. However, the success of DevCentral created some challenges that needed to be addressed. The biggest challenge was the ever-increasing number of users, applications, and modules. The more successful it became, the more the needs of every component grew. There were more users and internal customers, but also more globally-distributed users. There were also more security risks stemming from social application complexity and the open source framework. The DevCentral team identified clear changes that would be required to be made due to the stress on the system. They needed an improved understanding of application and infrastructure dependencies, better performance, and a manageable security plan.

F5 Networks is a Seattle-based application delivery networking vendor. They run a technical user community site called DevCentral, where over 100,000 global IT professionals collaborate with peers to enhance and create solutions to better deliver applications. DevCentral is a key competitive differentiator for F5, who is the recognized market share and innovative leader in its space. The community has immense value to F5 as it is proven to increase customer satisfaction and increase the likelihood of customers to recommend F5 to peers. The application features and functionality are directly linked to continued positive influence of those metrics. As successful as DevCentral was at the time, and continues to be today, the success created some challenges that needed to be addressed.

To support the team’s business plans to grow and strengthen its global community, DevCentral needed to accelerate and optimize its DevOps initiatives. It was determined the needs were best met by virtualizing the entire site, including F5 application delivery appliances and by migrating to Bluelock Virtual Datacenters (VDCs) hosted in the public cloud, a certified VMware vCloud Datacenter service offering. This move from an internal IT environment to the public cloud required enterprise architecture that mirrored what you would normally see in an internal datacenter. The architecture needed to address typical cloud concerns regarding security and performance while providing a reusable cloud framework that could be used for future F5 cloud projects. F5’s goal was to fully execute the migration in less than 30 days from contract signing. The final architecture resulted in a multifaceted strategy utilizing F5’s BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager with datacenter firewall services, BIG-IP Application Security Manager and BIG-IP Access Policy Manager along with BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager, BIG-IP Web Accelerator and BIG-IP WAN Optimization Manager solutions.

• New features ship faster with improved DevOps agility
• Valuable information assets and community trust are comprehensively protected
• F5 can scale cloud resources on demand and in line with their strategic plans

• Full migration in less than 30 days from contract signing
• Deployed over 100 sensors to monitor top-to-bottom health from a single point, including mobiles
• 42 total processes were provisioned across 2 virtual datacenters and only 124 GB of memory was utilized