DevCentral’s Featured Member for May – NTT Security’s Leonardo Souza

Leonardo Souza lives in the United Kingdom, with his partner, 5-year-old daughter, and a (very) recently newborn son. He’s Brazilian and lived in Portugal for quite a while. He then moved to UK about 5 years ago ‘because of the amazing weather,’ he jokes.

Leonardo started to work with computers when he was 18 years old (he’s not 18 anymore), so he’s worked with many technologies. Fast forward a bit (he’s not that old) and while working as a network engineer, he was working on a project to migrate applications from Alteon load balancers to F5 BIG-IP LTMs. He completed his LTM Essentials and LTM Advanced training during that time (2011) and with the migration project, he was impressed with BIG-IP.

He even applied for a job at F5 in 2012 and joined as a Network Support Engineer. That moved him from Portugal to UK, and has been doing F5 products exclusively ever since.

With all that, Leonardo is DevCentral’s Featured Member for May and we got a chance to talk with Leonardo about his life, work and scripting prowess.

DevCentral: You were an F5er from 2012-15 and continue to be a very active contributor in the DevCentral community. What keeps you involved?

Leonardo: I often say that 1 year in F5 support is equal to 5 years as a F5 customer.

While in F5 support, I had multiple technical challenges every day, and I would typically go to DevCentral to check iRules documentation and get ideas for uncommon cases. After I left F5, I started using DevCentral to stay up to date about what is going on in the F5 world by reading the DevCentral articles. Then I started to go there daily and answer some questions myself.

Short answer: to keep me updated, both about F5 news and my F5 knowledge.

DC: Tell us a little about the areas of BIG-IP expertise you have.

LS: Is difficult to know all F5 products, because some are for very specific networks/scenarios, but I know the common ones:

BIG-IP BIG-IP LTM, GTM/DNS, AFM, APM, ASM, EM, BIG-IQ, and iRules.

I had been a little bit lazy about the F5 certifications but recently I have done all level 300 exams. I have started study for the 401, so that should be done in the next couple months.

DC: As a Security Consultant at NTT Security, what’s your typical workday?

LS: First to clarify, the company recently changed names from NTT Com Security to NTT Security.

I work in professional services, doing projects that use F5 products. My daily work includes doing some pre-sales activities advising pre-sales team about the F5 products, doing projects, and finding solutions or writing scripts to automate some F5 tasks.

DC: Describe one of your biggest BIG-IP challenges and how DevCentral helped in that situation.

LS: I have been using DevCentral for many years, and iRules, to a point where it is part of my daily job. Flexibility is a major advantage for F5 and people ask all the time “Can you do this with an iRule?”

Recently, I was working in a project to upgrade many F5 devices. We had to perform an extensive inventory for each device which was taking about 3 days per device. I wrote a Python script using iControl SOAP to perform that task. (I still prefer bash script, but there is no iControl SOAP for bash)

It would take around 240 days to do that manually, and we did in around 3 days using the script.

DC: Finally, if you weren’t in technology – what would be your dream job? Or better, when you were a kid – what did you want to be when you grew up?