F5 Distributed Cloud Services - SaaS PAYG(Pay-As-You-Go)

I address security threats to my clients and customers through the capabilities of F5 Distributed Cloud Services, but I need clarification on some details.

The key benefits that my clients have seen from using F5 Distributed Cloud Services are the ease of configuration and the platform itself. It provides a unified platform for all policies and configurations, making it very easy and user-friendly, unlike the Big-IP appliance.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services helps improve traffic management efficiency. My clients previously worked with load balancers and LTM policies on Big-IP, and they now manage these from F5 Distributed Cloud Services itself, making configuration much easier.

I do not have any specific areas that need improvement. There do not appear to be any features that clients would like to see included or functionalities that can be enhanced at this time.

I have not experienced any stability issues with F5 Distributed Cloud Services. I find it to be very stable.

Regarding scalability, it is easy to scale up or scale out.

I am familiar with F5 customer service and the technical support team, as I opened a support ticket from my tenant to the Distributed Cloud support.

I would evaluate F5 technical support as not particularly fast in replying, but it is effective.

On a scale of one to ten, I think seven would be a fair rating for the technical support. This rating is based on the response time, which needs to be improved.

I have not worked with any other technologies or vendors personally, but I hear about them from competitors in the market.

The setup process is straightforward, and I have not encountered any challenges or complexities.

I work with F5 directly; however, I procure F5 Distributed Cloud Services through a distributor here in Egypt.

I do find F5 Distributed Cloud Services to be cost-effective, as it brings benefits and a strong return on investment.

Regarding pricing, I believe the prices are much higher than I expected, but for the time being, the customer is still paying. It is not really a cheap product.

From a pricing perspective, there should be more flexibility in the pricing model, as this leaves room for improvement. We are a platinum partner for F5, so we have aggressive discounts from the F5 team, but there is still competitive pricing pressure regarding the same product from other vendors.

Unfortunately, I do not have any examples that demonstrate improvements in security posture with F5 automated threat detection, as I did not investigate it on the technical side.

Given my extensive experience with F5 technologies, I have no piece of advice or recommendation that I can share with other organizations considering F5 Distributed Cloud Services.

Overall, I would recommend it. It is very easy to use and effective, and you can immediately configure the policies and configurations you need, with results appearing in seconds.

Other organizations do not need to keep anything specific in mind, as I have no specific advice to share before they consider moving to F5 Distributed Cloud Services.

I have given this review an overall rating of 8.5 out of 10.

It helped for many customers, and it is cheaper than Silverline, the previous service.

Regarding F5 Distributed Cloud Services, Silverline is no longer in use. I have been working with F5 Distributed Cloud Services and was even part of the migration of some customers from Silverline to F5 Distributed Cloud Services.

F5 is attempting to make F5 Distributed Cloud Services function in the cloud similarly to BIG-IP, bringing the same processes the TMOS operating system uses into the cloud environment. F5 Distributed Cloud Services is based on Envoy proxy. F5 Distributed Cloud Services is not as robust as desired. Although it has many beneficial features, it does not have TMOS in the background. It has the same WAF daemon; the BD daemon is the same WAF. They use the same WAF processes across their products: NGINX, BIG-IP, and F5 Distributed Cloud Services.

Regarding the DDoS protection feature in F5 Distributed Cloud Services, I would rate it seven out of ten. It provides layer three and four DDoS protection, and it also has layer seven DDoS protection. It has improved. Previously, I would have rated it six out of ten. Now it is seven out of ten because it includes machine learning capabilities.

For some virtual servers, the feature should trigger earlier, and for others, it should trigger later, depending on the virtual server's purpose and transaction volume.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services needs to add iRule support. This is the primary improvement needed.

For additional features I expect from F5 Distributed Cloud Services, iRule support is definitely necessary, along with more support for customizing layer three and four settings and layer seven, similar to BIG-IP, including TCP profiles and HTTP profiles. F5 Distributed Cloud Services does not have as much functionality to customize the TCP or HTTP settings.

I would also like to see more artificial intelligence capabilities. Some kind of artificial intelligence learning would be valuable. F5 Distributed Cloud Services has artificial intelligence for the WAF, but it does not have a BIG-IP WAF policy builder where the WAF policy is built from traffic. F5 Distributed Cloud Services does not have a policy builder feature.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services has open API discovery, but that is only useful for API traffic. F5 Distributed Cloud Services does not have such a feature for web traffic from normal users.

Concerning the price, I would say it is at a medium level. It is cheaper than Silverline, so it is a medium level.

Regarding room for improvement, sometimes it times out. However, I believe that is normal for a SaaS-based service in the cloud.

For technical support regarding F5 Distributed Cloud Services support, I would rate it seven out of ten.

I find BIG-IP pricing is high, but as I mentioned, it is worth it. BIG-IP, the previous product, is expensive but worth it. F5 Distributed Cloud Services is at a medium price point.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services has good competition, including Akamai and Cloudflare, and essentially all the SaaS offerings. They are also good. I am not a big fan of Akamai, but Cloudflare and CloudFront are alternatives. CloudFront was another option.

I would rate F5 Distributed Cloud Services seven out of ten overall.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services still does not have the same flexibility as BIG-IP. It does not have iRules. It has service policies that are a way of scripting, but they are not on the same level as BIG-IP. F5 Distributed Cloud Services uses Envoy proxy in the background, which is open-source.

For their real-time intelligence feature, I would rate it seven and a half out of ten.

There is room for improvement.

Regarding the load-balancing feature, I rate it seven out of ten, as mentioned. It is similar to the general platform because it does not have the same iRule capabilities. It has some scripting with a service policies feature, but it is not at the level of F5 iRules on BIG-IP.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services has helped improve my traffic management efficiency overall because it is cheaper than Silverline. In that respect, it is better than Silverline.

IRule support is definitely needed.

Speaking of the interface, the GUI is not the greatest, but I would rate it eight out of ten. It is a modern GUI.

It is much newer. It is not ten years old like BIG-IP. It is approximately three or four years old.

My overall rating for F5 Distributed Cloud Services is seven out of ten.

I am using F5 Distributed Cloud Services primarily for securing my infrastructure with layer 7 protection, which F5 provides. The scenarios and use cases I am protecting involve geo-blocking, rate limiting, and allowing specific traffic to my applications. I have OWASP Top 10 protections enabled, as F5 Distributed Cloud Services offers OWASP Top 10 for layer 7 protections, which provides multiple protection capabilities.

In my opinion, the best features F5 Distributed Cloud Services offers include their ability to operate without running on the cloud, which is why they provide good value to Indian customers. This feature benefits my organization by providing overall value and cost with the product. When I say the product is not hosted on the cloud, I mean that the product itself is managed by data centers as most clouds do. However, their seamless management of their own data center and the fact that F5 Distributed Cloud Services holds its own data center is what benefits customers in India.

Specifically, the confidence level on API security that F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides can be improved, especially if they can discover APIs in a better manner than all of their competitors.

I would estimate the cost was reduced by approximately 30 percent in the first year.

I rate F5 Distributed Cloud Services an eight out of ten overall.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services works as a Software as a Service based security, networking, and application management that can be deployed across multi-cloud, on-premises, or edge locations. It comes with an integrated package that includes Network Firewalls, Web Application Firewall, API security, and API Gateways into a single software. You don't have to buy four different vendors or four different bundles from other vendors. F5 Distributed Cloud Services comes as a package or bundle which has the load balancer, network firewall, web application firewall, and API security all in a single software stack.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments. This unified console is the best thing because you don't have to hire multiple people to operate with different environments, so you can unify that. It has a strong integrated security stack, including Web Application Firewall and bot defense. The defense system is very good, so you will hardly experience any attacks on the organization, and it really prevents them. Security is also very strong.

DDoS is a very common type of malware or attack in the market and can be easily injected into the network. F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a very good feature that completely protects the network from DDoS and similar attacks.

Real-time intelligence is timely and gets up to date. It has a super solid Kubernetes and DevOps features that enhance the security because whenever there's a new update or patches, it delivers them on time. This keeps the network and the complete cloud services of the organization strong with unified security which keeps the edge environment very compelling.

Load balancing is an important feature to understand. A load balancer works so that if you have one server, the completely traffic moves to that server. Sometimes what happens is it gets overloaded and it increases the chances of a crash. What this feature does is it balances the load by allowing you to put additional servers in different geo-locations. For example, if China users want to access the service, China users, India users, or US users don't have to access that one device, but it gets divided into three different zones. China users access the APAC server, and US users access the US region servers. This is how it balances the load of the traffic. F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well. It also provides redundancy, so if one server goes down, for example if the China server is down, China users can now access the APAC or India server without downtime. That's how it helps.

There are some gaps between the implementation, expectation, and the reality. The main point is user integration with other parts, such as on-premises. One thing is on-prem and the other one is on the cloud. It is sometimes difficult to implement or execute and bring that onto the same page. This is one thing I would say requires improvement and definitely they can solve this. Basically, this is a critical concern.

For one thing, if the organization does not need the complete bundle, it comes with huge costing included if you're putting something in a bundle. For example, one organization needs only a simpler use case, for example a CDN with very lightweight sort of security. I'm talking about very small organizations. For them, it is huge costing because they have to buy a complete bundle. They should have what CloudFlare provides, which is a simple CDN feature and API security that is very cheap and affordable. F5 Distributed Cloud Services doesn't have something like that. That is the reason why CloudFlare remains a leader in that space for small customers and those who have just started or are startups. That is one thing that can definitely be worked on.

It is because there are other players in the market that provide very cheaper and simpler environments or infrastructures, CloudFlare and Akamai. Comparatively, F5 Distributed Cloud Services is relatively much more expensive.

I have been using F5 Distributed Cloud Services for probably six to eight months.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services is very stable. I won't face any issues with stability as a concern because it provides the load balancers and all redundancy, so it's very unlikely that we have any downtime.

Call services they need to work on because mostly whenever I had some issues with F5 support, I have to send an email. Email sometimes gets a delayed response and they cannot immediately respond to your questions. Sometimes it is urgent, so again, I have to rely on their email services. Email services are good, but they need to have a good human-based interaction with the call centers.

If the organization is pretty old and already established in the market, then F5 Distributed Cloud Services is good for their investment. But for small players, it is completely not worth it. There are other players which provide similar features in a very affordable price, so I would give them a low rating.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services is definitely good with what they do. They have so many other technologies including BIG-IPs, distributed cloud services, CDN, and WAF, and they are doing pretty much good in this segment. As I mentioned earlier, if an already established organization wants to buy a bundle, then F5 Distributed Cloud Services has a clear, outstanding reputation in the market. Some people who cannot go with that, the big organization, then there are other options available. Whatever they promise, if they are charging a higher amount, they are giving the network organization a secure environment for sure.

One thing they need to work on is support, and the other one is that instead of a bundle, they should also come up with small packages for smaller players and smaller organizations who want to buy only services such as CDN or security APIs or simple WAF. They have the features available, but still, they can work on it. If with the cloud services, somebody wants to customize it, they should have that ability.