F5 VELOS: A Primer

F5, a leading partner of WWT in application delivery and security solutions space, has recently introduced a new hardware platform called VELOS. This platform is designed to meet the growing demand for high-performance, scalable and secure application delivery and security solutions. 

In this article, we'll explore the advantages of F5's VELOS platform and why your organization should consider it for their high-performance on-premises application delivery and security needs.

Scalability

One of the main advantages of VELOS is its scalability. This platform is designed to meet the growing demand for modern, scalable and secure application delivery and security solutions on premise or in the cloud via CNF. With its updated hardware and new F5OS software architecture, VELOS can handle the growing demands of modern applications and provide organizations with the ability to scale their application delivery and security solutions as their needs grow.

Performance

Another advantage of VELOS is its performance. The platform leverages the latest hardware and software technologies, such as Kubernetes, to deliver high-performance modern application delivery and security solutions. With its revolutionary and agile hardware and software architecture, VELOS can handle the demands of modern applications, providing organizations with the ability to deliver fast, responsive and secure applications.

Security

VELOS is designed to provide organizations with the highest level of security for their applications. The platform leverages F5's expertise in application delivery and security to provide a comprehensive security solution that protects against threats such as data breaches, unauthorized access and cyber-attacks. With its advanced security features and capabilities, such as Advanced WAF and SSLo, VELOS helps organizations secure their applications and protect their data while providing industry leading visibility into applications.

Flexibility

VELOS is also designed to be flexible, allowing organizations to choose the amount of hardware and software modules that best meet their needs. This platform supports expansion of hardware and software modules, providing organizations with the flexibility to deploy the right resource in the right location that best meet their needs. This flexibility allows organizations to choose the services that best meet their performance, scalability and security requirements. 

Are you required to give more control to the application teams? VELOS and F5OS support partitions, one or more blades with separate administrative zones and isolation from other partitions. What happens on one partitions, stays on that partition. Within the partitions are the tenants, themselves isolated from each other and being administratively separate as well. With tenants being classic BIG-IP or the upcoming BIG-IP Next, VELOS provides for what the future is bringing.

The real world

We've had the opportunity to exclusively work on the VELOS platform since August of 2020. We have been working hand-in-hand with F5's Product Development and Product Management teams to test and validate not only the new hardware platform but also F5OS-C, F5's revolutionary new operating system.

In our testing of F5's VELOS platform we found that classic BIG-IP tenants ran, on average, 7 percent above F5's published numbers for both throughput and sessions per second. 

The VELOS platform also sets customers up for F5's next generation of application delivery software, BIG-IP Next. The operating system for F5's new hardware platforms, VELOS and rSeries, is F5OS. F5OS is built using technologies such as OpenShift and Kubernetes to move application delivery into the cloud age. 

While classic BIG-IP with TMOS has powered F5's application delivery controllers since its launch in November of 2004, F5OS takes a new approach. Gone is the monolithic TMOS and in its place is micro-services of OpenShift and k8s. This reduces the size and increases the flexibility of the application delivery platform. This is currently in beta, and we are working with F5's PM and PD teams on testing and evaluation of this, so there will be more to come in further articles.

Conclusion

F5's VELOS platform is designed to meet the growing demand for scalable and secure application delivery and security solutions. With its cutting-edge hardware and software architecture, advanced security features and flexibility, VELOS provides organizations with the tools they need to deliver fast, responsive and secure applications. Organizations looking to evolve their application delivery and security, while still needing industry-leading performance, should consider VELOS as a solution to their needs.