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Load Balancing & Application Delivery

F5 LTM and GTM, content switching and SSL acceleration, from early e-commerce builds onward.

Also known as F5, LTM, GTM, SSL Acceleration

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 7 disciplines this one worked alongside, 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 used this technology is counted, so what shows here is the company it kept rather than 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.

F5 local and global traffic management in the enterprise estate, and before that content switches and SSL accelerators on e-commerce builds at Coleman Technologies alongside PIX firewalls.

The distinction that matters when choosing one is whether you want a device that balances traffic or a device that can understand and rewrite it. The second is a different purchase and a different discipline: a rule language in front of the estate means a migration can be cut over, a site retired or a service extended by changing a rule rather than by touching an application.

It concentrates risk in one device, which is the honest other half of the argument — a rule quietly carrying traffic for years is load-bearing whether or not anyone remembers writing it, and turning one off is an event. Keeping the variable parts in data groups rather than in the rules themselves is what keeps that manageable, and is the difference between an operator adding a site and an engineer editing production.

Applied in

  • Citrix Published Application Estate2005–2023Eighteen years, five platform generations and roughly 4,000 billed seats — with a per-seat price an agency could argue with.
  • Enterprise Traffic Management Platform2006–2022Sixteen years on a platform chosen for what it could be programmed to do rather than what it did on the day — bought as a server proxy in 2006 and ending as continuity infrastructure.
  • E-Commerce Site Architecture2000–2003PIX firewalls, content switches and SSL accelerators for early commercial web estates.
  • Insurance Carrier E-Commerce Platform2001–2003Mainframe to public web in 2001, across a colocation tunnel and two firewalls — where the deliverable was the boundary, not the website, and the documentation reached revision 243.

Career

See also

Also searched as

  • ADC
  • application delivery controller
  • reverse proxy
  • WAF
  • global server load balancing
  • GSLB