F5 is well-known for its BIG-IP application delivery controller (ADC) technologies, but that's not all the networking vendor is building. Yesterday, F5 announced a series of new capabilities for its multicloud networking technology, including Distributed Cloud App Connect and Distributed Cloud Network Connect.

The F5 multicloud networking technology has a basis in capabilities that F5 added to its portfolio in 2021, via the $500 million acquisition of Volterra. The Volterra technology has some of its origins in the Contrail SDN technology, which was acquired by Juniper Networks in 2012.

While Contrail as a commercial entity was acquired, the open source Open Contrail SDN technology continued to be developed and was renamed Tungsten Fabric in 2018. That SDN technology was further developed and extended by Volterra and is a base on top of which F5 has built out its F5 multicloud networking architecture and the new Network Connect and AppConnect services.

With the new Distributed Cloud Network and App Connect services, F5 is looking to help make it easier for organizations to better connect and control distributed deployments, which have made networking more complex than ever before. F5's State of Application Strategy in 2023 report found that 85% of organizations run distributed application deployments that cover both traditional and modern architectures, as well as multiple hosting environments. It's a challenge that the new multicloud networking capabilities aim to help solve.

“The traditional hierarchy of networks has kind of disappeared,” Michael Rau, SVP and General Manager, F5 Distributed Cloud Platform and Security Services, told SDxCentral. “It has become very difficult for traditional network operators to manage the underlying infrastructure that supports the applications.”

Rau explained that the Distributed Cloud Connect service brings advanced SDN functionality that enables organizations to abstract the underlying network infrastructure.

The basic idea is to enable organizations to take all of their applications across cloud and on-premises deployments and tie them together in a logical network construct. With the SDN overlay, Rau said that an organization can have better control and management of the distributed network, as the Distributed Cloud Connect provides unified visibility.

While the Distributed Cloud Connect component helps to solve the challenge of connected distributed networks, it doesn't solve the problem of connecting applications. What the new F5 Distributed App Connect service does on top of Distributed Network Connect is  provide a set of  layer seven application services. Those services include distributed load balancing services and the ability for an organization to make its workloads more portable from one cloud to another or even between your on premises locations and  the cloud.

Rau noted that Distributed App Connect also helps to enable application layer security security services as well. so no matter where the workload goes, the workload is protected.

“The security policy is managed through a single portal and a single policy that is easily managed across the entirety of the infrastructure,” Rau explained. “The benefit is that it simplifies the overall management and security control of an environment that is becoming increasingly more complex for a lot of enterprises.”