Leveraging Developers to Accelerate Your Application Capital Through Containerization

Just two weeks ago at AWS re:Invent, F5 unveiled a preview of F5 Cloud Services, another step in extending the reach of our portfolio of Multi-Cloud Application Services. Through F5 Cloud Services, we will enable “as-a-service” consumption of a broad range of application services, starting with DNS Delivery and Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB).

This week, here at KubeCon, we are introducing another F5 innovation, Aspen Mesh, a fully-supported service mesh built on Istio, now available in an open public beta.

In my last post, Building and Enhancing Your Application Capital Through Chaotic Innovation, I focused on the need for developer freedom to support innovation. It’s no surprise that Chaotic Innovation thrives when application developers are free to build and deploy new applications unencumbered by concerns about availability, stability, security, or compliance. Containerization helps.

The primary benefits of containers are pretty simple—efficiency and agility. Containers can be orders of magnitude faster to provision, more portable, and much lighter-weight to build and define versus full virtual machine images.

Containers aren’t simply the next evolution towards better physical asset utilization, they are also part of the solution to the talent shortage digital companies are facing. Consider the following frightening facts:

• According to research from The App Association, there are 223,000 job openings for software developers in the US alone. An informal search I performed on Indeed.com while writing this blog returned 212,000 job openings under the title “software engineer.”
• In addition, colleges and universities are graduating just shy of 30,000 new Computer Science majors per year. At this pace, it will take almost eight years to fill the current open roles.
• The demand for these skills is only growing—there are one million computer programming job openings expected by 2020.
• At the local level, only fourteen of the fifty states in the United States have adopted Computer Science standards even though 58 percent of all new STEM jobs are in computing. The primary and secondary education systems are not adapting their programs to teach the technical skills needed for the future workforce.

A recent Forrester research report stated, “Digital technology dramatically alters the balance of power between customers and companies. Using software, hardware, algorithms, and the internet, digital business leaders find that it's 10 times cheaper and faster to engage customers and deliver outcomes that their customers value. But the code that drives a digital transformation doesn't magically appear—it's written by developers. That's why digital natives like Amazon, Netflix, Stripe, and Uber value their software delivery capability more than any other corporate asset.”

Companies like Google, Facebook, and Salesforce leverage containers to make scarce developer resources more productive. Container technology will thus be a critical driver of the Application Economy, enabling companies to maximize the potential of their developers.

Where F5 Fits In

F5 is the leader in Application Services. Our container solutions accelerate your Application Capital in many ways. Here are a few:

• F5’s container integrations make it simple to leverage our world-class Application Services at ingress to your container environment.
• We improve the performance and end-user experience of your applications—we make your applications go faster in any environment.
• We make your developers more productive—we enable agility.
• We improve your enterprise security / risk posture—we make your applications safer.

Why F5? Why not other application service providers? Our value proposition is simple:

• F5 has the broadest and deepest portfolio of application services in the industry—and one that continues to grow.
• F5 offers the most flexible consumption of services and multi-cloud deployment options of any vendor.
• F5 backs all of it up with a world-class customer support organization.

When made a core part of an enterprise-wide infrastructure, F5 provides a level of assurance to the business that its application portfolio remains available, reliable, and secure while enabling chaotic innovation in any environment—containers and all.