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The Operational Consistency Proxy

#devops #management #webperf Cloud makes more urgent the need to consistently manage infrastructure and its policies regardless of where that infrastructure might reside

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While the potential for operational policy (performance, security, reliability, access, etc..) diaspora is often mentioned in conjunction with cloud, it remains a very real issue within the traditional data center as well. Introducing cloud-deployed resources and applications only serves to exacerbate the problem.

F5 has long offered a single-pane of glass management solution for F5 systems with Enterprise Manager (EM) and recently introduced significant updates that increase its scope into the cloud and broaden its capabilities to simplify the increasingly complex operational tasks associated with managing security, performance, and reliability in a virtual world.

f5em2.0AUTOMATE COMMON TASKS

The latest release of F5 EM includes enhancements to its ability to automate common tasks such as configuring and managing SSL certificates, managing policies, and enabling/disabling resources which assists in automating provisioning and de-provisioning processes as well as automating what many might consider mundane – and yet critical – maintenance window operations.

Updating policies, too, assists in maintaining operational consistency across all F5 solutions – whether in the data center or in the cloud. This is particularly important in the realm of security, where control over access to applications is often far less under the control of IT than even the business would like. Combining F5’s cloud-enabled solutions such as F5 Application Security Manager (ASM) and Access Policy Manager (APM) with the ability for F5 EM to manage such distributed instances in conjunction with data center deployed instances provides for consistent enforcement of security and access policies for applications regardless of their deployment location. For F5 ASM specifically, this extends to Live Signature updates, which can be downloaded by F5 EM and distributed to managed instances of F5 ASM to ensure the most up-to-date security across enterprise concerns.

The combination of centralized management with automation also ensures rapid response to activities such as the publication of CERT advisories. Operators can quickly determine from the centralized inventory the impact of such a vulnerability and take action to redress the situation.

INTEGRATED PERFORMANCE METRICS real-time-app-perf-monitoring-cloud-dc

F5 EM also includes an option to provision a Centralized Analytics Module. This module builds on F5’s visibility into application performance based on its strategic location in the architecture – residing in front of the applications for which performance is a concern. Individual instances of F5 solutions can be directed to gather a plethora of application performance related statistics, which is then aggregated and reported on by application in EM’s Centralized Analytics Module.

These metrics enable capacity planning, troubleshooting and can be used in conjunction with broader business intelligence efforts to understand the performance of applications and its related impact whether those applications are in the cloud or in the data center. This global monitoring extends to F5 device health and performance, to ensure infrastructure services scale along with demand. 

Monitoring includes:

  • Device Level Visibility & Monitoring
  • Capacity Planning
  • Virtual Level & Pool Member Statistics
  • Object Level Visibility
  • Near Real-Time Graphics
  • Reporting

In addition to monitoring, F5 EM can collect actionable data upon which thresholds can be determined and alerts can be configured.

Alerts include:

  • Device status change
  • SSL certificate expiration
  • Software install complete
  • Software copy failure
  • Statistics data threshold
  • Configuration synchronization
  • Attack signature update
  • Clock skew

When thresholds are reached, triggers send an alert via email, SNMP trap or syslog event. More sophisticated alerting and inclusion in broader automated, operational systems can be achieved by taking advantage of F5’s control-plane API, iControl. F5 EM is further able to proxy iControl-based applications, eliminating the need to communicate directly with each BIG-IP deployed.

OPERATIONAL CONSISTENCY PROXY

By acting as a centralized management and operational console for BIG-IP devices, F5 EM effectively proxies operational consistency across the data center and into the cloud. Its ability to collect and aggregate metrics provides a comprehensive view of application and infrastructure performance across the breadth and depth of the application delivery chain, enabling more rapid response to incidents whether performance or security related.

F5 EM ensures consistency in both infrastructure configuration and operational policies, and actively participates in automation and orchestration efforts that can significantly decrease the pressure on operations when managing the critical application delivery network component of a highly distributed, cross-environment architecture.

Additional Resources:

Happy Managing!

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It also says that “servers that run in the cloud are going all-flash” starting with the boxes in Facebook’s data centers. They’re no longer combined with hard disks.
Fusion-io says its ION Data Accelerator software transforms 1U servers into network-shared ioMemory data acceleration appliances delivering over one million IOPS, up to 6 GB/s throughput and under 0.06 millisecond access latency. Applications that need access to shared data benefit from the performance.
It’ll scale as the underlying server and networking get fancier and it won’t lose data to power outages.

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Writer’s iCloud hacked as Wozniak calls cloud “horrendous”

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Speaking after a performance of Mike Daisey’s monologue “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”, Steve Wozniak was in uncompromising mood concerning his thoughts on cloud computing.

Wozniak reportedly told the packed theatre audience: “I think [cloud’s] going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years”.

Five years is a long time. According to Gartner, four years is all it will take for a third of consumers’ digital content to end up in the cloud.

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Gartner has stated these points using a different language. I am being more direct.
Cloud Computing has started going down the “trough of disillusionment”!
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1. NBC’s Olympics coverage proves the point that all the great technology in the world is wasted if the human element is forgotten. This has been a stunning technological display, accompanied by some of the most ignorant commentary and craven corporatism imaginable.
2. The sudden pivot to SDN in particular and networks in general scares me. Too soon, guys, you’re getting ahead of your customers.
3. I agree with @krishnan that it’s asinine to talk about how open source has “won.” This has never been a zero-sum discussion.
4. Our summer in Northern Illinois has been statistically equal to the norm for Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live in Oklahoma; now I don’t have to.
5. Related to Thought #2, this talk of public-cloud consolidation makes me nervous. How can something be consolidated before it’s been allowed to mature?
6. Read my article about Citic and its new Singapore datacenter. Gaze in wonder at all the US vendors mentioned. Agree with me that cloud computing creates great jobs and that IT jobs are only going to be more sophisticated in the future, not wiped out.
7. Write a letter to your Congressperson and Senator and implore them to focus on how to rebuild our economy on technology in general and cloud computing in particular. Yes, write a letter. Don’t send an email, as most of them don’t yet know how to use it. And by all means, don’t tweet it. They’ll think you’re some sort of subversive.

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