Forum Discussion
CirrostratusAS3 Limitations
Below are some limitations of AS3 as means of Automation.
- config deployment is locked down by Automation, no manual intervention possible for below use cases
- incidents
- new requirements/features need to wait for automation to be updated
- Automation failures cause deployment to be stalled until automation is fixed
- Operational issues, maybe require out-of-band changes outside of AS3
- Source of truth must be reconciled periodically with F5 device to check for config drift
- 2 layers of failures during config deployment one is Automation and second is source of truth, therefore involves more troubleshooting effort
- Reliance on an External Source of Truth management, non-native to F5 and not supported by F5
- AS3 is Less mature compared to iControl Rest, iControl Rest was introduced in TMOS 11.x
3 Replies
- Nikoolayy1
MVP
Still AS3 now is a mature technology as it is on the market for more than 2 years and it is heavily used in NEXT. Also about the source of truth well the world moves that way as all good developers utilize it and this way changes can actually be faster reverted or tested by going to different or lower branch 😉
ZdenekLooking at AS3 git, I would not say it is mature technology, sorry.. I cannot imagine I would hit any of those bugs in our production environment, that is simply not acceptable for all the reasons.
So I am happy F5 changed mind and allows direct (imperative) API to the BIGIP even on Next appliances, we don't need to evaluate another ADC providers and possibly start from scratch.
- Nikoolayy1
If you compare to the REST-API I agree which is more mature but for example NetScaler Next-Gen API that is declarative is just released in a testing/expiremental form (so not even GA) shows that other ADC vendor's declarative API are not so mature or even not existant. Having AS3 and normal API is right way to go for me 😉
