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I address security threats to my clients and customers through the capabilities of F5 Distributed Cloud Services, but I need clarification on some details.

The key benefits that my clients have seen from using F5 Distributed Cloud Services are the ease of configuration and the platform itself. It provides a unified platform for all policies and configurations, making it very easy and user-friendly, unlike the Big-IP appliance.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services helps improve traffic management efficiency. My clients previously worked with load balancers and LTM policies on Big-IP, and they now manage these from F5 Distributed Cloud Services itself, making configuration much easier.

I do not have any specific areas that need improvement. There do not appear to be any features that clients would like to see included or functionalities that can be enhanced at this time.

I have not experienced any stability issues with F5 Distributed Cloud Services. I find it to be very stable.

Regarding scalability, it is easy to scale up or scale out.

I am familiar with F5 customer service and the technical support team, as I opened a support ticket from my tenant to the Distributed Cloud support.

I would evaluate F5 technical support as not particularly fast in replying, but it is effective.

On a scale of one to ten, I think seven would be a fair rating for the technical support. This rating is based on the response time, which needs to be improved.

I have not worked with any other technologies or vendors personally, but I hear about them from competitors in the market.

The setup process is straightforward, and I have not encountered any challenges or complexities.

I work with F5 directly; however, I procure F5 Distributed Cloud Services through a distributor here in Egypt.

I do find F5 Distributed Cloud Services to be cost-effective, as it brings benefits and a strong return on investment.

Regarding pricing, I believe the prices are much higher than I expected, but for the time being, the customer is still paying. It is not really a cheap product.

From a pricing perspective, there should be more flexibility in the pricing model, as this leaves room for improvement. We are a platinum partner for F5, so we have aggressive discounts from the F5 team, but there is still competitive pricing pressure regarding the same product from other vendors.

Unfortunately, I do not have any examples that demonstrate improvements in security posture with F5 automated threat detection, as I did not investigate it on the technical side.

Given my extensive experience with F5 technologies, I have no piece of advice or recommendation that I can share with other organizations considering F5 Distributed Cloud Services.

Overall, I would recommend it. It is very easy to use and effective, and you can immediately configure the policies and configurations you need, with results appearing in seconds.

Other organizations do not need to keep anything specific in mind, as I have no specific advice to share before they consider moving to F5 Distributed Cloud Services.

I have given this review an overall rating of 8.5 out of 10.

It helped for many customers, and it is cheaper than Silverline, the previous service.

Regarding F5 Distributed Cloud Services, Silverline is no longer in use. I have been working with F5 Distributed Cloud Services and was even part of the migration of some customers from Silverline to F5 Distributed Cloud Services.

F5 is attempting to make F5 Distributed Cloud Services function in the cloud similarly to BIG-IP, bringing the same processes the TMOS operating system uses into the cloud environment. F5 Distributed Cloud Services is based on Envoy proxy. F5 Distributed Cloud Services is not as robust as desired. Although it has many beneficial features, it does not have TMOS in the background. It has the same WAF daemon; the BD daemon is the same WAF. They use the same WAF processes across their products: NGINX, BIG-IP, and F5 Distributed Cloud Services.

Regarding the DDoS protection feature in F5 Distributed Cloud Services, I would rate it seven out of ten. It provides layer three and four DDoS protection, and it also has layer seven DDoS protection. It has improved. Previously, I would have rated it six out of ten. Now it is seven out of ten because it includes machine learning capabilities.

For some virtual servers, the feature should trigger earlier, and for others, it should trigger later, depending on the virtual server's purpose and transaction volume.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services needs to add iRule support. This is the primary improvement needed.

For additional features I expect from F5 Distributed Cloud Services, iRule support is definitely necessary, along with more support for customizing layer three and four settings and layer seven, similar to BIG-IP, including TCP profiles and HTTP profiles. F5 Distributed Cloud Services does not have as much functionality to customize the TCP or HTTP settings.

I would also like to see more artificial intelligence capabilities. Some kind of artificial intelligence learning would be valuable. F5 Distributed Cloud Services has artificial intelligence for the WAF, but it does not have a BIG-IP WAF policy builder where the WAF policy is built from traffic. F5 Distributed Cloud Services does not have a policy builder feature.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services has open API discovery, but that is only useful for API traffic. F5 Distributed Cloud Services does not have such a feature for web traffic from normal users.

Concerning the price, I would say it is at a medium level. It is cheaper than Silverline, so it is a medium level.

Regarding room for improvement, sometimes it times out. However, I believe that is normal for a SaaS-based service in the cloud.

For technical support regarding F5 Distributed Cloud Services support, I would rate it seven out of ten.

I find BIG-IP pricing is high, but as I mentioned, it is worth it. BIG-IP, the previous product, is expensive but worth it. F5 Distributed Cloud Services is at a medium price point.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services has good competition, including Akamai and Cloudflare, and essentially all the SaaS offerings. They are also good. I am not a big fan of Akamai, but Cloudflare and CloudFront are alternatives. CloudFront was another option.

I would rate F5 Distributed Cloud Services seven out of ten overall.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services still does not have the same flexibility as BIG-IP. It does not have iRules. It has service policies that are a way of scripting, but they are not on the same level as BIG-IP. F5 Distributed Cloud Services uses Envoy proxy in the background, which is open-source.

For their real-time intelligence feature, I would rate it seven and a half out of ten.

There is room for improvement.

Regarding the load-balancing feature, I rate it seven out of ten, as mentioned. It is similar to the general platform because it does not have the same iRule capabilities. It has some scripting with a service policies feature, but it is not at the level of F5 iRules on BIG-IP.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services has helped improve my traffic management efficiency overall because it is cheaper than Silverline. In that respect, it is better than Silverline.

IRule support is definitely needed.

Speaking of the interface, the GUI is not the greatest, but I would rate it eight out of ten. It is a modern GUI.

It is much newer. It is not ten years old like BIG-IP. It is approximately three or four years old.

My overall rating for F5 Distributed Cloud Services is seven out of ten.