F5 Networks, Inc. is a transnational company that specializes in application services and application delivery networking. F5 technologies focus on the delivery, security, performance, and availability of web applications, including the availability of computing, storage, and network resources. 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. F5 technologies are available in data center and cloud environments.
Corporate history
F5 Networks, originally named F5 Labs, was established in 1996. In 1997, F5 launched its first product a load balancer called BIG-IP. When a server went down or became overloaded, BIG-IP directed traffic away from that server to other servers that could handle the load. In June 1999, the company had its initial public offering and was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange with symbol FFIV. In 2010 and 2011, F5 Networks was on Fortunes list of 100 Fastest-Growing Companies. The company was also rated one of the top ten best-performing stocks by S&P 500 in 2010. F5 was also named a Best Place to Work by online jobs and recruiting site Glassdoor in 2015 and 2016. Competitors included Cisco Systems, Citrix Systems, and Radware. 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 “” in a nod to the company's history. The team continues to research application threats and publish findings every week to benefit the broader security community.
Acquisitions
uRoam for US$25 million in 2003
Magnifire WebSystems for US$29 million in 2004
Swan Labs for US$43 million in 2005.
Acopia Networks for US$210 million in 2007
DPI intellectual property from Crescendo Networks in 2011
Shape Security for US$1 billion on December 19, 2019
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 : Local load balancing based on a full-proxy architecture.
Access Policy Manager : Provides access control and authentication for HTTP and HTTPS applications.
Advanced Firewall Manager : On-premises DDoS protection, data centre firewall.
Application Acceleration Manager : through technologies such as compression and caching.
IP Intelligence : 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.
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:
Creation of a Traffic Management Microkernel 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 vulnerability in the BIG-IP Traffic Management User Interface. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system. Because of the severity of this vulnerability, F5 recommended updating BIG-IPs to the latest version and provided additional mitigation details in a security advisory.
BIG-IQ
F5 describes BIG-IQ as a framework for managing BIG-IP devices and application services, irrespective of their form factors or deployment model. 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.F5 Networks#cite note-24|
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 with containerized environments.
Container Connector combines F5's application services platforms with native container environment management and orchestration systems such as Kubernetes, RedHat OpenShift, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and Mesos.
