DevCentral's Featured Member for June - Aubrey King

Our Featured Member series is a way for us to show appreciation and highlight active contributors in our community. Communities thrive on interaction and our Featured Series gives you some insight on some of our most engaged folks. This month, for only the second time, we're featuring an F5er! Why? Because Aubrey just joined the DevCentral Team and we are excited to have him!! F5 DevCentral Solution Architect Aubrey King is our Featured Member for June! Let's catch up with Aubrey! 

DevCentral: First, please explain to the DC community a little about yourself, what you do and why it is important. 

Aubrey: I’m the newest member of Dev Central Connects, covering Security. To me, community coverage of security is important because it adds a layer of trust with customers that might not, otherwise, be evident. To help users when they want to extend the reach of our product has led to SO many enhancements in BIG-IP over the years. We’ve got more platforms for extensibility, so I’ve got a lot of work to do.. and VERY big shoes to fill. 

DevCentral: Tell us a little about the technical expertise you have. 

Aubrey: My operations career was mostly in Open Source Systems Architecture in Service Provider. I worked massive scale systems on the largest IP network on the planet, which connects all of the continents by trans-oceanic fiber-optic cables. I found F5 while solving a devastating business challenge for another former employer, a top-20 SaaS mail provider, and have been devoted ever since. Here at F5, I was the first to develop a community Business Development white paper around Palo Alto firewall sandwiches and became quite proficient with our AFM product set as a SME Lead in our SE organization. Most recently, I have been focused on Distributed Cloud solutions and hope to bring quite a bit of content from that experience. 

DevCentral: How do you see yourself contributing to the Community in your new role? 

Aubrey: I want to be a champion for security innovation in our community. I think there are so many excellent ideas in and around F5, from a community perspective, that we can highlight. I want to make sure the best of these ideas get seen by as many people as possible. 

DevCentral: You used to be a Sr. Solutions Engineer at F5.  Can you describe your typical workday and how you manage work/life balance? How has the pandemic impacted your work? 

Aubrey: My work-life balance is something I’ve had to manage as an at-home worker since 2003, so, amazingly, the pandemic did not impact that much, except that my whole family was now also at home. Typically, my work day involved me on conference calls with customers all day long, with very few breaks in-between meetings. When things were face to face, it was a bit better, in terms of having time to innovate, as people were in transit much more often. 

DevCentral: Describe one of your biggest Customer challenges and how the community helped in that situation. (Does not necessarily have to be devcentral) 

Aubrey: When I was a customer, we had an issue with our LDAP servers continually crashing each day. I came to find out that our BIG-IP 6400s had LDAP connections hang on for a VERY long time. Eventually, we’d crash our slapd, which then bombed our LDAP cluster with a ton of new connections from the failed member.. which crashed all of them, as well. This caused massive outages on our platform and many headaches and bruised egos in our systems team. I was happy to wander upon this gem: 
https://community.f5.com/t5/technical-articles/unbind-your-ldap-servers-with-irules/ta-p/275674 

This became the utility by which we were able to smite our LDAP demons. 

 DevCentral: If you weren’t doing what you’re doing – what would be your dream career? Or better, when you were a kid – what did you want to be when you grew up?  

Aubrey: My dream career is to write comic books. I’m hoping to retire to that, honestly. J When I was a kid, I was fairly certain I’d be a rock star.. or at least someone who recorded rock stars. 

DevCentral: Finally, what are you a Force for?? 

Aubrey: I am a force for F5 Security. 

---Thanks Aubrey and welcome to the team! We really appreciate your willingness to share with the DevCentral Community. Stay connected with Aubrey on social media:

• Aubrey on LinkedIn
• Aubrey on Twitter

series-devcentral-featured-members