Health Solutions Company Expands Capabilities of F5 Network
In this case study
Situation
A leading health solutions company's vast F5 network and operational needs had reached critical mass and were pushing the boundaries of performance and capacity. The IT organization which served hundreds of application owners and supported thousands of devices across the company needed the ability to scale effectively and efficiently to meet demand.
The company was seeking a way to create synergies between the operations teams and application owners. Closer collaboration between the groups would give operations teams the ability to effectively provision and manage devices on the F5 network. At the same time, it would give application owners the ability to efficiently deploy and manage services on those devices.
The company needed a robust, durable solution that could seamlessly and efficiently transform, automate, and expand their current network and operations in new and cost-effective ways.
Solution
Delivering value through organizational agility
WWT partnered closely with the company's IT organization and the end users they serve on an agile approach to iteratively define, develop and incrementally deploy a self-service application delivery controller (ADC) utility in short release cycles over multiple phases to provide tangible value in real time.
Our focus on people, process, tools and workflows created a holistic development and operations strategy that weaved DevOps principles and practices within the company's software development life cycle (SDLC) and operations model.
This methodology increased speed, efficiency and quality of software development. It also advanced the company across the automation maturity scale to provide continuous and sustainable delivery.
A novel self-service ADC utility
Working hand-in-hand with the client, we created a custom, lightweight, plug-and-play, self-service ADC utility on the company's core F5 network Big IQ/IP services. The utility serves as a companion application to F5 and provides an intuitive, easy-to-use interface that seamlessly integrates with F5 Big-IQ and Big-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) services.
IT teams and application owners across the F5 network can use the utility to gain on-demand, direct, secure, and controlled access to search and manage devices and applications. This is possible through imperative and declarative API automated workflows, application pools and pool members, and virtual servers, overlaid by security policies and an administration center to manage and maintain devices and applications at scale quickly and effortlessly.
Specifically, the utility provides:
- Enhanced search
- Provisioning
- Device monitoring
- Pools and pool member management
- External data grouping
- Virtual Server trafficking
- Security policies and role-based access control (RBAC)
- Logging
- Reporting
- Administration center (device, application and operational services)
Results
The ADC utility has delivered new levels of efficiency to IT teams and application owners. For example, in one week alone, the utility saved 45 effort hours.
In addition to time savings, the company has benefited from:
- Streamlined IT operations
- Expanded and enhanced network services at scale
- Reduced costs
- On-demand device and application management in real time
- Simplified maintenance and compliance
Areas of Expertise
Meeting networking demands is a complex undertaking that requires the right mix of technology, people, capabilities and areas of expertise.
Here's what the client solution required:
- Technical consulting
- Architectural design
- Infrastructure and application modernization
- Infrastructure as code
- Application development
- DevOps and automation
- Quality assurance
- Delivery management
How we can help you
WWT's outcome-based approach to agile software development and engineering delivers customer value early and often. We capture iterative feedback to guide decisions and produce impactful solutions at the speed of your business. We can:
- Solve your toughest challenges by leveraging experts with the experience, discipline, and track records of implementing complex custom applications that provide real value.
- Untangle complex software development efforts to enhance your ability to respond to market changes quickly and take advantage of new technologies.
- Upskill and transform your development teams by educating them on techniques and processes proven to generate quality, maintainable solutions that last.
- Close skills gaps and complement your organization's own software development initiatives by tapping into our deep pool of talented developers.