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Forum Discussion

PhilK_293657's avatar
PhilK_293657
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Sep 30, 2016

Using iRules to separate applications and components across a large server environment.

I am a developer, not an f5 expert (just learning up on iRules...).   Problem today: 15 of our internal applications are all hosted on the same set of application servers. We have 3 load balanced a...
application delivery
BIG-IP
devops
iRules
Kai_Wilke's avatar
Kai_Wilke
Icon for MVP rankMVP
Oct 02, 2016

Hi Phil,

1.) Our internal F5 team thinks this is quite a bit of work. I think its worth the benefit this gives us. What do you think?

I think the F5 team should support the APP teams as required. If there is a strong enough bussiness case to distribute your applications on independend backend systems then it should be done.

2.) Does this seem like a reasonable thing to do? Or is this not what F5 is designed for?

The F5 is capable to handle multiple independent web sites on a single virtual server and then even spread individual URIs to different backend applications. There is basically no limit involved.

You can route the request as needed via 

[switch]
based iRules (good for <50 sites or URIs), via data-group (aka. 
[class]
command) driven iRules (good for >50 sites or URIs) or by using the GUI based LTM Policies (less flexible but on the other hand much more performant than iRules for hostname/uri parsings and pool assigments).

Cheers, Kai