Does anybody even make hardware any more? You'd be forgiven for asking the question, even if it does sound slightly ridiculous. But thinking about it… apart from the device you're reading this on and the hardware in the server racks in the cloud datacenter serving this website, is anyone even making that much hardware?
The 'trouble' is, the whole world has gone software-defined and that means some of what we used to do with hardware, we now do with software.
F5 Networks CTO Karl Triebes says that 90 percent of his firm's innovation and development time is devoted to software, with the remaining 10 percent still focused on the hardware products that his firm is perhaps better known for. F5 makes Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) to optimise the delivery and security of network-based applications. These things are physical things that come in a box i.e. they are hardware.
Software (almost) alone
A more accurate statement than the above would be to say that the whole world has gone 'software-defined' – and that means some of what we used to do with hardware that shipped with a good proportion of onboard software intelligence, we now do with software (almost) alone.
Networks used to be hardware-based systems with physical elements like switches, routers and hubs to direct the flow of data around. F5's Triebes says that switches will always exist as hardware due to their price-functionality point, but the rest of it can start to be built from software or be built to function with what we often call a 'software appliance'. Indeed, he insists that F5 now presents a 'platform play' and that the firm now works with a developer community of some 200,000 individuals.
What this now means is that (as a security focused company) when F5 talks about security, the company talks about securing the application inside the datacenter, rather than securing the network itself per se (although that should be secured too). Tuning web application firewalls to the actual needs of the particular application is is part of where where the company now working.
Developers don't 'get' networks
“Customers want to drive cost OUT of their networks so they can drive agility when they need to,” said Triebes. He says that the network can provide connectivity, but it doesn't inherently understand how the applications inside it need to be deployed. “Software application developers don't have an appreciation for the routing and switching layer of the network's topography, so we need to be able to bring that kind of intelligence forward,” he said.
F5 says that its users are moving to a much more software-defined level of services i.e. as a notion of the “orchestration of events” within the network.
Looking at the firm's recent news, the F5 Silverline cloud-based 'platform' (there's that word again) that provides detection and mitigation designed to stop volumetric DDoS attacks from reaching the network. Now a cloud-delivered managed service, the Silverline Web Application Firewall service is intended to provide quick web application firewall (WAF) implementation and policy enforcement capabilities. The new WAF offering is built on the capabilities of the company’s BIG-IP Application Security Manager product.
The network became untethered
“Cloud architectures, mobile devices, and SaaS applications have untethered the traditional IT network, increasing the complexity of application security. F5’s Silverline platform gives their customers new ways to deploy cloud-delivered and hybrid services to realize performance gains and efficiencies. With respect to WAF and related security functions, in-house experts can be challenging to hire and expensive to keep,” said Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research.
A cloud server rack without the software intelligence: place coffee cups and pies on warmest part... [+]
Where all this leads us to is a state where applications themselves start to change once they make it to the cloud…
“Networks are no longer statically provisioned, cloud is a more dynamic state of affairs all round” states F5's Triebes.
… if a cloud application (built by a software application developer that didn't have an appreciation for the DNA of the cloud network that he or she throws the application at, remember?) needs to exhibit a service that the initial iteration of the program now needs to show, then this can happen, Programmatically, we can start to write that function to the cloud application. F5 says we can do this using its iRules product.
“iRules utilizes an easy to learn scripting syntax and enables you to customize how you intercept, inspect, transform, and direct inbound or outbound application traffic,” says the firm.
If we believe F5's take on the way network computing now interoperates then this is why cloud computing is (almost) all software, this is why cloud networks are more agile, changeable and flexible than our old notion of networks and this is why cloud networks should be considered to be a 'fabric' – rather than lumps of commodity hardware.
Yes cloud computing starts of a solid lump of metal held in a server rack, but until the software comes in it's only good for warming up your coffee cups and meat pies.
Disclosure: F5 paid for Adrian Bridgwater's travel costs to attend its EMEA Agility 2015 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland.
