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F5 Networks

Sixteen years of local and global traffic management — chosen in 2006 for its rule language rather than its balancing, and ending as the mechanism the continuity design rested on.

Product lines and other names: BIG-IP, LTM, GTM

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 8 disciplines F5 Networks carried, ordered so kindred disciplines sit next to each other rather than alphabetically — a landscape only means anything if neighboring rows belong together. Height is the work running in that domain in that year, weighted by what failure would have cost — life-safety ×3, a statutory obligation ×2.2, the estate itself ×1.5, an evaluation ×1. Every project declares which of those it was, so each ridge traces to an entry you can open and disagree with. Only the work that named this manufacturer is counted, so this is the shape of what it carried rather than of the record around it. Height and color are on the record-wide scale rather than this page’s own, so a modest estate draws a modest landscape and any two of these pages can be read against each other.

BIG-IP LTM and GTM, carried for sixteen years and selected for what it could be programmed to do rather than what it did on the day. The rule language is the reason: redirects, landing pages, analytics logging, source-address handling and access control all lived as rules on the traffic manager rather than as changes to the applications behind it.

Data groups alongside them, so that extending a service to another building was a list entry rather than an edit to a production rule. The application security module went onto the original purchase order because the question asked at design time was whether anything in the path would actually read what crossed it.

Also named on the dispatch platform for XLerator replication and disaster recovery testing, on the solid waste modernization at 12.1.5.2, and in the five-year continuity plan as the global traffic management layer deciding which data center a request reaches.

Where it appears

Declared on each entry rather than listed here, so this page cannot drift from the work it describes. What each entry named is quoted as it stands, with how much of that project rested on it and what stands behind the claim beside it. The first of those drives the height of the surface above.

City of Jacksonville

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