F5 has been helping drive business forward for years by helping organizations meet the demands of relentless growth in applications, users, and data. With their solutions, businesses gain strategic points of control wherever information is exchanged – from client devices and the network to application servers, data storage, and everything in between. Now this global heavyweight in Application Delivery Networking (ADN) has announced that is has migrated its global online community, DevCentral, to a cloud environment.

DevCentral runs F5’s cloud-based ADN solution in the Bluelock cloud, while simultaneously incorporating the best IT practices for added scale, control, and security. Previously, DevCentral was deployed in a basic, one-size-fits all enterprise IT environment, and needed a new business plan to strengthen its global community and accelerate and optimize their DevOps initiative.

Jeff Browning, senior director of Product Management at F5, elaborated on the thought process behind moving DevCentral to the cloud, as well as some of the benefits this move affords. Browning explained, “As our community has grown, our application platform has evolved, as have our ambitions to constantly add new features/functionality that make it easier for our members to connect with peers, learn more about F5, and get more from F5 technologies. While our existing multi-datacenter solution managed by corporate IT provided a stable platform, it was built to support many F5 business applications that had more rigid change controls and shared infrastructure. To achieve our objectives, we want to be able to push application updates frequently and our existing datacenters and operations were just not built for that.”

Additionally, DevCentral’s deployment of virtual cloud applications reflects those with a more traditional data center design. Collaborating with Bluelock, combined advanced Cloud design with proven, F5 ADN capabilities, which provides DevCentral with benefits such as a simplified lifecycle migration, reduced complexity, cost-effectiveness, clear visibility across infrastructure, platforms and applications, and closer workgroup collaboration.

“The benefits really span our community members, partners, and F5. Members now get more frequent site enhancements to make their experience better. Our partners are able to collaborate with us on a very unique project that is 100 percent cloud yet meshes nicely with traditional IT best practices, to help enterprise workgroups or new projects utilize the cloud more gracefully. We benefit from a happier community, greater agility in terms of how frequently we can push updates, assurance we have enterprise-grade security with F5 firewall and web app firewall, and ongoing insight into how we can continually improve our products to serve customers wanting to use the cloud as an extension of their IT portfolio,” Browning added.

Also today, F5 introduced its cloud licensing program, which enables enterprise-class ADN solutions in the cloud. Not only will this provide a unified architecture for both private and public clouds, but will also use virtual editions of its award-winning BIG-IP platform to offer its advanced ADC (News - Alert) services in a utility billing model.