External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
I use it in the IT environment in Brazil for a financial bank in Latin America.
We're primarily using BIG-IP LTM across our data centers, employing it for global load balancing with GTM. This setup is crucial for our operations in Mexican, Colombia, and Brazil as well.
The biggest impact is in security solutions, for example, with HCM, which is recognized in the Gartner. We use BIG-IP for cloud security and branch management in the cloud.
Moreover, the integration with other networks or security solutions improves the infrastructure.
In Brazil, within the government environment, we use BIG-IP for load balancing and another solution as a proxy, which is called Blue Coat.
We utilize BIG-IP, for example, for load balancing. The VPN model we use is called ARC. The first solution connecting with BIG-IP is very effective.
The features that I like include LTM and Global Traffic Manager (GTM).
BIG-IP could improve in supporting microservices, for example, in Docker and Kubernetes environments.
Accessing and load balancing with Docker and Kubernetes is becoming more common in financial banks to scale services globally.
I have been using it for many years.
The stability is 50-50 because the environment has a lot of connections, which influences stability. For example, the VM in the environment sometimes becomes unstable, particularly the connection. In such cases, we need to decrease the connections within the environment.
Scalability is easier to manage because it's possible to scale up big clusters, both in cloud-based and enterprise environments. So, it caters well to new business segments.
There are 8,000 end users in the company.
My impression of the support team is mixed; sometimes good, sometimes bad. For example, when I raised a ticket for an IMEI issue and needed to replace BIG-IP, it failed. No problem, this process is very easy for replacing the software. So, I had a complex problem in my environment. The standard package was not satisfactory.
Neutral
I used a different solution, but its performance was very bad in comparison to F5 BIG-IP.
The initial setup is 50% complex and 50% easy because I had to follow a lot of steps. It wasn't that simple.
In our environment, it is 90% in AWS. I use BIG-IP in the cloud, where the cloud fronts are AWS, Columbia, and Brazil, creating the infrastructure.
The pricing is standard.
The pricing is moderate, not too expensive, and not too cheap. For a small company, it might be considered very expensive.
I would recommend using this solution.
Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten.
