Getting Started with Automating Deployment of MCN & Edge Compute

Overview

F5 Distributed Cloud services (XC) provide full REST APIs to enable automation of the deployment and management of multi-cloud infrastructure. Organizations looking to implement infrastructure-as-code operations for modern apps, distribute and secure multi-cloud deployments can utilize and adapt the Terraform and Ansible scripts in the many articles on F5 DevCentral that cover automation topics for F5 Distributed Cloud. Typically these scripts automate and help to consistently :

deliver resources, services, and apps into multiple cloud environments (AWS, Azure), configuring of app resources such as Kubernetes (K8s), and setting up Multi-Cloud Networking (MCN) between environments using Terraform scripts with Terraform provider config for each target cloud;
secure application resources customers’ distributed cloud infrastructure with consistent networking and security policies;
operate and manage of such configurations across multiple clouds and across app stack layers (from VMs, K8s, runtimes), networking configuration (MCN), and app connectivity (App Connect).

This article focuses on only the Deliver part of the distributed app lifecycle, where using Terraform script with F5 Distributed Cloud Services organizations can easily deploy and configure multi-cloud networking & app connectivity of their distributed applications that span across:

Customer Edge (CE) public cloud
Edge Compute (Appstack, for such scenarios as Retail Branches or compute on-prem)
Regional Edge (RE) deployments

Getting Started with Automation

The easiest place to get started with Automation of Multi-Cloud Networking (MCN) and Edge Compute scenarios is by cloning the corresponding GitHub repositories from the Demo Guides, which include sample applications and provide opportunities to see automation scripts in action. The Terraform scripts within the following Demo Guides can be used as a template to quickly customize to your organization’s requirements to automate repetitive tasks or the creation of resources with just a quick update of variables unique to your environment to customize automation actions.

Multi-cloud networking use-cases Demo Guide where you can use Terraform to enable connectivity for multiple clouds and explore using HTTP and TCP load balancers to connect the provided sample application. You can use the provided scripts in the GitHub repositories to deploy the required sample app, and other components representative of a traditional 3-tier app architecture (backend + database + frontend).

Furthermore, the scripts provide flexibility of choosing the target clouds (AWS or Azure or both), which you can adapt to your environment and app topologies based on which clouds the different app services should be deployed to. Use the guide to get familiar with how to update variables for each cloud configuration, so that you can further customize to your environment to help automate and simplify deployment of the networking topologies across Azure and AWS, ultimately saving time and effort.

Edge Compute for Multi-cloud Apps Demo Guide where Terraform scripts help automate deployment of the application infrastructure across AWS (sample app and other components representative of a traditional 3-tier app architecture – backend, database, frontend). The result is a multi-cloud architecture, with components deployed on Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS.

By adapting the included Terraform script you can easily deploy and securely network app services to create a distributed app model that spans across:

Customer Edge (CE) public cloud
Retail Branch (AppStack on a private cloud)
Regional Edge (RE)

In the process you get familiar with the configuration of TCP and HTTP Load Balancers, create a vK8s that spans multiple locations / clouds, and deploy distributed app services across those locations with the help of the Terraform scripts.

Deploying high-availability configurations Demo Guide is an important resource for getting familiar with and automating High-Availability (HA) configuration of backend resources. In this guide, as an example, you can use a PostgreSQL database HA deployment on a CE (Customer Edge), which is a common use-case leveraging F5 Distributed Cloud Customer Edge for deploying a backend. First, deploy the AWS Site environment, followed by deployment of a vK8s, and then customizing and running Bitnami Helm chart to configure a multi-node PostgreSQL deployment.

Of course, you can leverage this type of automation with a Helm chart of your choice to configure a different backend resource or database type. Adapt to your environment with a few changes to the script variables, and feel free to combine with scripts from the other two guides to deploy the app(s) and configure networking (MCN) should you choose to automate the entire workflow.

Customization and Adaptation

Terraform scripts represent ready-to-use code, which you can easily adapt to your own apps, environments, and services or extend as needed. The baseline for most scripts is using the Volterra Provider with required edits / updates of the variables in Terraform. These variables are special elements that allow us to store and pass values to different aspects of modules without changing the code in the main configuration file. Variables allow the flexibility of updating the settings and parameters of the infrastructure, and it facilitates its configuration and support.

Variables are stored and can be found in .tf files of the respective folders. Using the Deploying high-availability configurations Demo Guide as example, you change the environment variable values related to your app, which you can find in the terraform folder and the application subfolder. Open the var.tf file to update the values:

More detailed information on variables can be found here.

Conclusion

In summary, Demo Guide repositories include Terraform scripts used to help automate different operations, including deployment of the environment required for the sample distributed app, as well as deploying the app itself. You can take a closer look at the Demo Guide use-cases together with their respective Terraform scripts, run a quick test to get familiar with the use-case, and then adapt the scripts to your environment and your applications.

Whether your app has high availability requirements or distributed multi-cloud infrastructure, using Terraform with F5 Distributed Cloud Services can simplify deployment, automate infrastructure on any cloud and save time and effort managing and securing app resources in any cloud or data center.