With this week’s $500 million acquisition by application delivery controller supplier F5 Networks Inc. of cloud-native network and security provider Volterra Inc., F5 aims to create an edge services platform for businesses and service providers to deliver and secure “cloud” apps at scale.

I put the term cloud in quotes because it’s the changing definition of cloud that drove this acquisition. As an industry, we’ve been talking about cloud for decades, but the reality is that cloud has gone through multiple evolutionary phases.

The first wave of cloud was hosted computing where organizations would run critical applications off their premises in a highly security environment, optimized for performance. Even once these infrastructure-as-a-service services came to market, most businesses took advantage of them by performing a “lift and shift” of legacy apps. That provided cost advantages, but the application performed essentially the same.

The second wave of cloud brought cloud-native apps. In this phase, applications were built with the concept that the cloud is now the primary enterprise compute platform. App developers would choose their favorite cloud provider, but the way apps were designed didn’t really change monolithic architectures, where the entire application stack resides in a single cloud platform. Even organizations that embraced the concept of multicloud used them as separate platforms where application A was built on one cloud and application B on another.

We have now entered the third wave of cloud, something I’ve been calling distributed cloud. This has been driven by the rise of microservices and containers, enabling application developers to build apps by accessing services from numerous cloud and edge providers. Almost all modern apps are now being built this way and it fundamentally changes the definition of the cloud from being a single location to a distributed set of services.

This shift has a profound impact on the way applications are delivered and secured. With traditional applications, information technology professionals leveraged physical applications such as load balancers, firewalls and application delivery controllers or ADCs. These were deployed alongside applications in physical data centers and enabled apps to perform better and be secured. With the second wave of cloud, the vendor community virtualized these services to enable them to be deployed as a cloud instance.

With distributed cloud, application components are modularized, are available as container resources and can reside in any cloud or edge location. Also, app components are now highly ephemeral and only get spun up when needed and then are deprecated just as quickly. The highly dynamic nature of distributed cloud and containerized workloads can’t be supported effectively with physical or virtual infrastructure as the necessary levels of agility just aren’t there. Containers can be spun up in seconds, meaning the supporting network and security infrastructure needs to be spun up just as quickly.

That’s what Volterra brings. The company offers a broad set of ADC services directly from the cloud, making it an ideal fit for F5, who has long been the market share leader in tradition and virtual ADCs. With traditional ADCs, customers would need to deploy multiple virtual appliances across numerous clusters.

This is an excellent complement to the F5’s current portfolio comprised of BigIP physical and virtual appliances for traditional applications and Nginx Inc., which is used in hybrid clouds. Now F5 has a way delivering ADC services regardless of the customer’s cloud strategy.

Volterra also addresses some new challenges unique to distributed cloud. It recently released a new auto-discovery capability for application programming interfaces that uses machine learning to find all APIs that an application uses. It can then automatically apply policies to white-list valid APIs, reducing the attack surface of any given app. That can help secure apps without having to delay app release cycles from having to build extra security into the app.

I expect to see many similar acquisitions this year that address cloud-native security and networking. There are start-ups such as Alkira Inc. and Aviatrix Systems Inc.,which offer cloud-native networking, and Snyk Ltd. and Aqua Security Software Ltd., which are in the security space.

But I believe Volterra is the only vendor that addresses both sides of the coin, which is why I consider them to be the “Daphne Bridgerton” of this market. I’ve been expecting them to get bought for quite some time and thought VMware Inc. to be the mostly likely acquirer.

This is a continuation of the transformation of F5 that Chief Executive Francois Locoh-Donou has been pushing since he arrived at the company in 2017. Prior to his arrival, F5 talked the talk of embracing cloud, but it’s fair to say, it didn’t walk that walk.

Since he arrived, the company purchased Nginx and Shape Security Inc. and rolled out a number osoftware-as-a-service offerings such as its Silverline services, DNS cloud service and Web App Firewall. Volterra gives it as highly flexible edge to get a jump on customers looking to leverage the agility of distributed clouds.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

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