F5 Announces Strategic Collaboration Agreement with Amazon Web Services to Allow Customers to Innovate Faster in the Cloud

 F5 Networks announced a multi-year global Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to allow customers to use F5 for new cloud-native application workloads and extend their existing F5 investments on AWS.

F5’s application services ensure the performance and security of millions of applications for enterprises around the world. The Strategic Collaboration Agreement will enhance companies’ ability to leverage the full suite of F5 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud-native application services to migrate, build, secure, and operate their applications on AWS. The structured framework of this engagement will allow customers to have a consistent and scalable operating model for their application assets on AWS, while exploring future innovations that enhance migration and operation of applications to the cloud. Customers can use advanced F5 solutions to standardize, scale, and optimize application services for AWS environments, from lift-and-shift and re-platforming, to full application development and modernization.

“F5 has collaborated closely with AWS for years, most recently on our SaaS offering, F5 Cloud Services. Together with AWS, we are providing a set of solutions that help enterprises deploy apps quickly and securely, while ensuring they are performant and comply with policy,” said Chad Whalen, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Sales at F5. “This aligns with our strategy of supporting modern DevOps practices and serving engineering teams with capabilities that create the most efficient path from code to customer.”

Enterprises are adopting the cloud to speed innovation cycles and create efficiencies, but today many companies must maintain separate data center and cloud environments, which drive up their operational costs, add complexity, and increase risk. These customers need a hybrid cloud solution that allows their applications to run with consistent performance and security regardless of the location. The work F5 and AWS do together addresses this need, allowing organizations to use F5 application services across all environments. Additionally, F5 solutions will make it easier for DevOps teams and application developers to provision, configure, and manage services via APIs or the web portal, without the need for deep networking or security expertise.

“The ability to deploy and run applications on AWS using F5 services is an important requirement for many customers that have standardized on F5 for application delivery and security,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales and Business Development at Amazon Web Services, Inc. “This Strategic Collaboration Agreement elevates our historic relationship with F5 to a higher level. It will be a great asset for customers as they build new cloud-native applications on AWS and move an increasing number of mission-critical workloads such as SAP and Windows to AWS.”

As part of the collaboration, F5 and AWS will work to create a frictionless path to allow customers to easily upgrade to F5’s next-generation application services, including:

• F5 Cloud Services: Cloud-native, SaaS-based application performance and security services.
• BIG-IP Virtual Edition: Software-based, full-featured Layer 4–7 application delivery and security services.
• NGINX: Lightweight, highly scalable, and highly performant API management, and full-service proxy software built atop the world’s leading open source web server.
• Silverline: Cloud-based managed services platform for application threat protection.
• Aspen Mesh: An enterprise-ready, fully supported service mesh built on Istio.

“StockCharts.com is benefiting tremendously from the close collaboration between F5 and AWS,” said Chip Anderson, Founder and President of StockCharts.com. “By leveraging F5’s cloud solutions on AWS, our new cloud strategy is allowing us to provide our customers with a faster, more reliable, secure, and scalable set of web applications. We are now providing more insight and data, faster than ever before.”