MORE THAN LOAD BALANCING

BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager enables you to control network traffic, selecting the right destination based on server performance, security, and availability.

Full proxy means full power

Because BIG-IP LTM is a full proxy, you can inspect, manage, and report on application traffic entering and exiting your network, and BIG-IP LTM gives you granular control over app traffic.

Blazing fast SSL

The SSL performance of BIG-IP LTM lets you cost-effectively protect the end-to-end user experience by encrypting everything from the client to the server. It also scales on-demand and absorbs potentially crippling DDoS attacks, block bad traffic and allow good traffic to pass through.

TCP Optimization

The highly optimized TCP/IP stack, TCP Express, combines TCP/IP techniques and improvements in the latest RFCs with extensions to minimize the effect of congestion and packet loss and recovery. Independent testing tools and customer experiences show TCP Express delivers up to a 2x performance gain for users and a 4x increase in bandwidth efficiency.

Performance optimization

Using real-time protocol and traffic management decisions based on application and server conditions, extensive connection management, and TCP and content offloading, BIG-IP LTM dramatically improves page load times.

Programmability

BIG-IP LTM is programmable, so you can take the visibility and control it provides and immediately act on it using iRules.

Scale and Speed

With BIG-IP LTM, you get a sophisticated, enterprise-class load balancer. You also get granular layer 7 control, SSL offloading and acceleration capabilities, and ScaleN technology that delivers on-demand scaling.

APPLICATION DELIVERY WITH AUTOMATION AND ORCHESTRATION

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager™(LTM) helps you deliver your applications to your users in a reliable, secure, and optimized way. You get the extensibility and flexibility of application services with the programmability you need to manage your cloud, virtual, and physical infrastructure. With BIG-IP LTM, you have the power to simplify, automate, and customize application services faster and more predictably.

Deliver applications rapidly and reliably

Optimize for today's web applications with HTTP/2 to ensure that your customers and users have access to the applications they need----whenever they need them.

Automate and customize with programmable infrastructure

Control your applications----from connection and traffic to configuration and management----with F5 iRules LX for network programmability, with Node.js language support in BIG-IP. Use the F5 Automation Toolchain for a declarative approach to efficiently provision, configure, and manage appliances.

Transition to SDN and cloud networks

Realize operational consistency and comply with business needs across physical, virtual, and cloud environments with deployment flexibility and scalability.

Easily deploy and manage applications

User-defined F5 iApps Templates make it easy to deploy, manage, and gain complete visibility into your applications.

Secure your critical applications

Protect the apps that run your business with industry-leading SSL performance and visibility.

APPLICATION INTELLIGENCE

Application Traffic Management

BIG-IP LTM includes static and dynamic load balancing to eliminate single points of failure. Application proxies give you protocol awareness to control traffic for your most important applications. BIG-IP LTM also tracks the dynamic performance levels of servers in a group, ensuring that your applications are not just always on, but also are easier to scale and manage.

Secure Application Delivery

BIG-IP LTM delivers industry-leading SSL performance and visibility for inbound and outbound traffic, so you can cost-effectively protect your entire user experience by encrypting everything from the client to the server. It also defends against potentially crippling DDoS attacks and provides ICAP services for integration with data loss protection (DLP) and virus protection.

Application Delivery Optimization

BIG-IP LTM dramatically improves page load times and the user experience with HTTP/2,intelligent caching, extensive connection optimization and management, compression, RAM Cache performance, F5 TCP Express™, and F5 OneConnect™. It also makes real-time protocol and traffic management decisions based on application and server conditions, enables rules customization and programmability, and TCP and content offloading.

Application Visibility and Monitoring

Monitor exactly how your application is performing for real users based on application response times, network conditions, and user context. F5 Analytics captures application-specific statistics,such as URL, throughput, and server latency, reported at different levels of the service. BIG-IP LTM makes it simple to integrate with your existing tools using industry standards such as sFlow, SNMP, and syslog.

AUTOMATION AND ORCHESTRATION

F5 Automation Toolchain allows network and application services such as traffic management and application security to be managed programmatically, through simple, declarative APIs versus traditional manual imperative configurations.

At the core of the F5 Automation Toolchain is the Application Services 3 Extension (AS3) which enables administrators and developers to automate layer 4-7 application services. AS3 also provides a sustainable foundation to enable F5's Infrastructure as Code (IaC) strategy and future integration with third-party orchestration, SDN, and NFV solutions.

F5 Declarative Onboarding enables initial provisioning of F5 solutions, as well as configuration of layer 2-3 objects such as route domains, routes, self IPs, and VLANs.

The F5 Telemetry Streaming Extension is an iControl LX extension that aggregates, normalizes, and forwards statistics and events to consumer applications such as Splunk, Azure Log Analytics, AWS CloudWatch, AWS S3, Graphite, and more.

The F5 API Services Gateway is a TMOS-independent Docker container which runs F5's iControl LX framework and provides a lightweight, fast, portable, TMOS-independent vehicle for customers to leverage iControl LX.

The F5 Automation Toolchain delivers a process-driven approach to automation. Use the components of the Automation Toolchain to efficiently provision, configure, and manage the services that support your apps.

F5 ecosystem integrations with Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and Cisco ACI help you simplify orchestration and configuration management across public and private clouds and on-premises, delivering software-defined networking with policy-driven automation and increasing the speed of app deployment through automated provisioning.

PROGRAMMABLE INFRASTRUCTURE

Local Traffic Policies

BIG-IP local traffic policies are a structured, data-driven collection of rules created by populating tables in a web UI. These policies allow you to inspect, analyze, modify, route, re-direct, discard, or manipulate traffic, and solve common use cases previously covered by simple iRules.

iRules

The F5 iRules scripting language enables programmatic analysis, manipulation, and detection of all aspects of the traffic in your networks. Customers routinely implement security mitigation rules, support new protocols, and fix application-related errors in real time. With robust and flexible iRules, you can easily and rapidly develop solutions that you can confidently deploy across multiple applications.

iRules LX

iRules LX is the next stage of evolution for network programmability that brings Node.js language support to the BIG-IP platform. Node.js allows JavaScript developers access to over 250,000 npm packages that make code easier to write and maintain.

iApps

F5 iApps Templates is a powerful feature that enables you to deploy, manage, and analyze enterprise application services as a whole rather than individually managing configuration and objects. iApps gives you greater visibility into and control over application delivery----and helps you deploy in hours rather than weeks.

iCONTROL

The F5 iControl APIs and SDK allow automation and integration of custom applications into allcaspects of BIG-IP LTM and other BIG-IP modules. iControl is delivered as both REST and SOAP APIs to fit the model best suited for your organization. With iControl, every aspect of BIG-IP LTM configuration, including most aspects of all BIG-IP modules----from device and application provisioning to application tuning and health and support initiation----can be programmatically automated to achieve dynamic infrastructures.

SCALABLE INFRASTRUCTURE

Cloud-Ready

BIG-IP LTM makes it easy to realize operational consistency and comply with business needs across physical, virtual, and cloud environments, removing the friction of transitioning applications between traditional physical and cloud architectures. Available in public clouds and for migration across multi-cloud.

ScaleN

F5 ScaleN™ technology uses the F5 VIPRION chassis, Device Service Clusters, and the scaling capabilities of F5 Virtual Clustered Multiprocessing™ (vCMP) to enable more efficient, elastic, and multi-tenant solutions for data centers, clouds, and hybrid deployments.

Virtual Networking

The BIG-IP SDN Services module natively supports VXLAN and NVGRE to offer gateway capabilities with BIG-IP LTM bridging virtual and traditional networks. This lets you keep things simple, applying application delivery network services across both virtual and traditional networks.

Advanced Routing

The BIG-IP Advanced Routing™ Module allows BIG-IP LTM to provide network routing capabilities such as BGP, RIP, OSPF, ISIS, and BFD for enhanced interoperability within the network, increasing the resilience and capacity of your network.

MORE INFORMATION

To learn more about BIG-IP LTM, visit f5.com to find these and other resources.