F5 and Reactivity Get Comfortable

Earlier this week F5 Networks and Reactivity announced a partnership that on the outside appears to be an innocent go-to-market strategy, but a deeper look shows the two are doing more than just holding hands... One of the benefits of a SOA management and security product is the ability to route traffic using what most refer to as "content based routing". The term is seen often in the SOA space, even at the mid-tier in ESB products like those from BEA, Sonic Software, Oracle and IBM.

But it's more commonly used in the SOA management and security space, where proxies are often used to mediate for back-end web services. If the first thing you thought of at the mention of "content based routing" is load balancers, or content switches, then you're thinking in the right direction. Content switches, or application delivery controllers (ADC) as they now like to be called, like F5's BIG-IP, Netscaler's (Citrix) Application Delivery Switch, and Sun's line of Secure Application Switches have been routing traffic based on content for years. But these ADCs have been limited in their definition of Layer 7, traditionally routing based on specific layer 7 attributes like HTTP headers and cookies. It's only been in the past two years that they've fully embraced the concept of routing traffic based on the rest of the content : the payload.

SOA management and security vendors, however, started life with a view of layer 7 as the be-all and end-all of content based routing. That's because much of the information they utiize to determine where and how to route XML is hidden in the SOAP envelope, which is deep within the payload of a message. But SOA management and security vendors are not often networking gurus, and their focus remains on supporting the myriad WS-* speficiations and standards necessary to manage and security Web services, not on optimizing their content routing and proxy capabilities.

Which has always left us, at least, wondering when the two markets would begin to cozy up to one another.

The announcement, made jointly by F5 and Reactivity, tells us we can stop wondering. It isn't just about chaining an application delivery controller and an SOA management product, it's about integration of the two products at a much deeper level. F5 has often touted its TMOS architecture as being pluggable, but thus far hasn't let any partners really look under the kimono - let alone try it on. It has reserved that particular facet of its BIG-IP line as an expedient mechanism for integrating its acquisitions, like WatchFire, MagniFire, and Swan Labs.This partnership is different, as Reactivity's software will be integrated into TMOS and essentially become an extension of the BIG-IP. How much of its functionality will exposed through F5's iRules interface -- the flexbile, scripting-based language customers use to route traffic and mediate protocols -- remains to be seen.

We've seen some excellent advances in performance in SOA security and management products over the past few years, but latency continues to be a problem due to the compute intensive nature of parsing XML. Adding additional hops into the mix - as would happen with the implementation of an application delivery controller - only increases the end-to-end latency of XML-based traffic. If they do it right, by integrating directly into F5's BIG-IP, Reactivity gains the advantages of acting as an agent rather than a proxy, which only benefits both vendors and customers. Instead of parsing the XML twice, it's only parsed once. Instead of the overhead of two separate intermediaries setting up and tearing down TCP sessions, there is but one. The performance advantages are obvious, as is the ability for the BIG-IP to intelligently route XML traffic and apply policies through Reactivity's SOA management expertise.

We are, of course, withholding judgment until we see this converged beast in the lab, but the impact of this particular partnership will likely be felt throughout the industry if the integration is done right. This is particularly true as a deep partnership between these two vendors brings to market a single solution not unlike Cisco's AON. While Cisco has been slow to push AON, the vision of a converged traffic management and XML/SOA management solution is certainly the right one, and the F5/Reactivity integration validates that vision as much as Cisco's entry into the space did a year ago.