F5 Friday: Master of Puppets

No, not the head-banging, gritty,heavy metal Metallica song (though that's certainly awesome too.. excuse me for a moment while I turn it up to 11) but the Puppet as in automation kind of master.

The importance placed on APIs - which are key to automation - in our State of Application Delivery 2015 survey was high, with 40% of respondents saying it was important to them that their infrastructure be API-enabled. Automation using those APIs is generally being accomplished through a variety of means with frameworks like Puppet being a popular toolset. 20% of respondents indicated they currently use Puppet, placing it firmly in the top 5 frameworks in use.

That means support for infrastructure - including network infrastructure - responsible for providing the application services that deliver applications today and keep them secure, fast and available is increasingly important. Puppet is no stranger to the importance of providing the support for automating these critical infrastructure services, introducing last year its PuppetSupported program targeting network infrastructure.  

Now Puppet labs has released a fully supported F5 module for Puppet Enterprise on the forge. This is in addition to their previously released puppet approved open source module for 11x. The module, according to the forge:

• This module uses REST to manage various aspects of F5 load balancers, and acts as a foundation for building higher level abstractions within Puppet.
• The module allows you to manage nodes, pools, in order to manage much of your F5 configuration through Puppet.

This module fully supports BIG-IP LTM (Local Traffic Manager), which is responsible for availability and performance services across F5's portfolio of application services. In the near term we plan to expand the breadth of supported F5 puppet modules to include our security and DNS services as well as offer more robust BIG-IP LTM configuration management.

If you'd like to learn more there is a webinar scheduled for the 7th of April in which we'll be demoing our joint capabilities so sign up and check it out!