F5 Networks

Encyclopedia

F5, Inc. is an American company that specializes in application services and application delivery networking (ADN). F5 is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, with additional development, manufacturing, and administrative offices worldwide.

F5’s offering was originally based on a load-balancing product, but has since expanded to include acceleration, application security, and DDoS defense.

Competitors include Citrix Systems and Radware.

Corporate history

F5 Inc, originally named “F5 Labs,”, and formerly branded “F5 Networks, Inc.” was established in 1996. Currently their public facing branding generally presents the company as just “F5.”

In 1997, F5 launched its first product, a load balancer called BIG-IP. BIG-IP served the purpose of reallocating server traffic away from overloaded servers.

In June 1999, the company had its initial public offering and was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange with symbol FFIV.

François Locoh-Donou replaced John McAdam as president and CEO on April 3, 2017.

On May 3, 2017, F5 announced that it would move from its longtime headquarters on the waterfront near Seattle Center to a new downtown Seattle skyscraper that will be called F5 Tower. The move occurred in early 2019.

In 2017 F5 launched a dedicated site and organization focused on gathering global threat intelligence data, analyzing application threats, and publishing related findings, dubbed “F5 Labs” in a nod to the company’s history. The team continues to research application threats and publish findings every week.

Products

BIG-IP

F5’s BIG-IP product family comprises hardware, modularized software, and virtual appliances that run the F5 TMOS operating system. Depending on the appliance selected, one or more BIG-IP product modules can be added. Offerings include:

  • Local Traffic Manager (LTM): Local load balancing based on a full-proxy architecture.
  • Application Security Manager (ASM): A web application firewall.
  • Access Policy Manager (APM): Provides access control and authentication for HTTP and HTTPS applications.
  • Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM): On-premises DDoS protection, data centre firewall.
  • Application Acceleration Manager (AAM): through technologies such as compression and caching.
  • IP Intelligence (IPI): Blocking known bad IP addresses, prevention of phishing attacks and botnets.
  • WebSafe: Protects against sophisticated fraud threats, leveraging advanced encryption, client-less malware detection and session behavioral analysis capabilities.
  • BIG-IP DNS: Distributes DNS and application requests based on user, network, and cloud performance conditions.

F5’s acquisition of NGINX shores up the TMOS market share against the growing shift to the cloud and away from large hardware-based ADCs. As TMOS continues to fail to live up to its promise of simplifying traffic management many companies in the cloud are still opting to forego TMOS to install and maintain NGINX and BIND on their own. Those already invested in BIG-IP have to manually fix errors caused by TMOS themselves or risk DNS outages for being out of spec.

BIG-IP history

On September 7, 2004, F5 Networks released version 9.0 of the BIG-IP software in addition to appliances to run the software. Version 9.0 also marked the introduction of the company’s TMOS architecture, with significant enhancements including:

  • Moved from BSD to Linux to handle system management functions (disks, logging, bootup, console access, etc.)
  • Creation of a Traffic Management Microkernel (TMM) to directly talk to the networking hardware and handle all network activities.
  • Creation of the standard full-proxy mode, which fully terminates network connections at the BIG-IP and establishes new connections between the BIG-IP and the member servers in a pool. This allows for optimum TCP stacks on both sides as well as the complete ability to modify traffic in either direction.

Subsequent releases enhanced performance, improves application security, and supported cloud application deployments. In July 2020 F5 admitted a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in the BIG-IP Traffic Management User Interface (TMUI). An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system.

Because of the severity of this vulnerability (CVE-2020-5902), F5 recommended updating BIG-IPs to the latest version and provided additional mitigation details in a security advisory. “K52145254: TMUI RCE vulnerability CVE-2020-5902”. f5.com.

BIG-IQ

F5 describes BIG-IQ as a framework for managing BIG-IP devices and application services, irrespective of their form factors (hardware, software or cloud) or deployment model (on-premises, private/public cloud or hybrid). BIG-IQ supports integration with other ecosystem participants such as public cloud providers, and orchestration engines through cloud connectors and through a set of open RESTful APIs. BIG-IQ uses a multi-tenant approach to management. This allows organizations to move closer to IT as a Service without concern that it might affect the stability or security of the services fabric.

Silverline

Silverline is a cloud-based managed security service. Its offerings include security services such as WAF, DDoS, and Anti-Bot protection services. The Silverline services are enabled by BIG IP ASM, Shape, and NGINX technology platforms.

Cloud, container and orchestration solutions

In 2017, the company introduced technologies to make F5 capabilities more portable across a broader range of IT environments, including:

  • Application Services Proxy is an automated traffic management proxy that provides F5 services (and service portability) with containerized environments.
  • Container Connector combines F5’s application services platforms (including BIG-IP and Application Services Proxy) with native container environment management and orchestration systems such as Kubernetes, RedHat OpenShift, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and Mesos.

Shape AI Fraud Engine (SAFE)

SAFE is a SaaS offering designed to eliminate fraudulent online transactions by evaluating them via AI in order to understand intent and block potential fraud before it happens. The application leverages the technology acquired from Shape Security.