F5 Friday: Engineering, Experience, and Bacon?

#iApp #v11 If you were wondering what these three things have to do with F5, read on …

What has a strange sense of humor, an unhealthy love of bacon and donuts, and has held a wide variety IT roles and responsibilities for a whole lot of years?

If you were said “the F5 Product Management Engineering team” give yourself a cookie (or better yet some bacon).

The question is, why should you care?

To understand that, you first have to understand the role that “PME” has within F5. Many of the solutions F5 offers are based not only on the group’s effort and experiences, but many are the product of that effort and those experiences. If you ever wondered who was beyond our Application Ready Solutions (detailed, step-by-step application-focused deployment guides) now you have your answer: it’s PME. Our most recent release of BIG-IP, v11, also brought with it iApp. A key facet of iApp is the portability of iApp templates and scripts, especially with respect to the ability of F5 and its customers to share existing iApp implementations. The iApp packages that come from F5 after many months of development, collaboration with partners, and lots of testing are almost unilaterally created by? You got it, PME.

That’s why it was particularly exciting to see Karen Jester, who manages the Product Management Engineering team, begin blogging. If you were looking for insight and an expert voice on iApp – from technical details to business benefits – then Karen’s recently launched blog will definitely be right up your alley.

She’s kicked off a series of blog posts on iApp that are definitely worth a read. What’s also helpful is that she’s putting iApp into the context of the BIG-IP system as a whole. After all, iApp isn’t a disconnected technology – it’s part of a larger ecosystem that makes up the F5 control plane comprising application, data, and management. These interconnects and integrations are an important aspect of BIG-IP in general, as it offers operational consistency across a multitude of architectures and environments, ultimately enabling the dynamic data center and IT as a Service.

Give Karen’s posts a read, bookmark her blog or subscribe to the feed. You won’t be disappointed with the insight and information that someone who’s inside – both the technology and the organization – can provide.