Codeshare Challenge: And the Winners Are...

Leading into June’s Programmability Month, we announced a codeshare challenge contest, where DevCentral community members could contribute a solution (or several) that they’ve created to solve problems in their environments. We had a lot of great contributions to the codeshare throughout the contest, and it’s always hard to narrow down something as nebulous as “best.” That said, we looked for originality, creativity, best practices coding and documentation, as well as breadth of audience for a particular solution. Please join us in congratulating our winners.

Grand Prize - iControl REST Library for the Go Programming Language

Yann Desmarest has been quite active in the codeshare in general but also in this contest, contributing many entries. As we discussed our top selections in each category of the contest, the initiative in this entry to unlock the ease in which a new language can be tried by the community made this library our clear grand prize winner. Go is taking off in popularity, so for those who are not specific language apologists (looking at some of you perl, python, and powershell people,) maybe this is an opportunity to load it up and check it out! Or for the seasoned developers among you, contribute to the project on Github!

iControl Category Prize - Automate F5 Setup with Ansible

Mark Wall contributed this mighty fine entry in the iControl category. Ansible is a simple but powerful workflow tool that combines orchestration with config management and deployment. In this contribution, Mark uses Ansible to deploy a (virtualized) pair of BIG-IPs by defining from a spreadsheet of comma-separated values. Currently, this includes NTP, DNS, hostname, LACP, dot1q, interfaces, vlans, and self-IPs. But it doesn’t stop there! It also configures device trust and config sync as well. If you think about the normal user interaction with the GUI to take these steps, that’s quite a time savings and elimination of human error (in as much as the spreadsheet data is correct.)

iRules Category Prize - Provision IOS for Exchange Active Sync

As mentioned earlier, Yann Desmarest was busy in this contest, and not only takes home the grand prize, but also the category prize for iRules for his iPhone provisioning solution for Exchange active sync. The need would normally require an MDM, but since the use case is such a small percentage in the larger MDM portfolio, it doesn’t make sense to include that additional infrastructure. Using an iFile for the IOS config file, he uses active directory query to populate some variable fields, then rocks the subst command to replace his variables from the iFile with the values set from AD. Pretty slick, and very powerful.