Production-Ready OpenStack LBaaS with F5 Template-based Provisioning

We're at OpenStack Summit this week in Vancouver and we're excited for the second year in a row to be able to announce even more support for one of the automation frameworks that made it into the top five frameworks in our State of Application Delivery 2015 survey.

Last year we announced support for a BIG-IP LBaaS plug-in. That community-supported plug-in was designed for test and development, but wasn't really appropriate for production ready OpenStack deployments. Additionally, it wasn't really a good fit with our management and orchestration platform, BIG-IQ, as the plug-in took advantage of our iControl SOAP API - something BIG-IQ doesn't support.

So we (and by 'we' I mean two of our incredibly talented architects) put their heads together and refactored the community supported plug-in  to not just take advantage of our iControl REST API, but also our template-based provisioning and configuration technology, iApps. And we decided that the OpenStack Summit was the best place to announce early availability.

That means you'll be able to use the latest LBaaS plug-in (1.08 ) for OpenStack (available here on DevCentral and fully supported through an Early Access (EA) program) to provision BIG-IP directly or proxied through BIG-IQ if you need centralized command and control for all the BIG-IP under management.  We've also got some guides and best practices to help you out. You can also grab those here on DevCentral.

Additionally, the latest version of the community-supported plug-in makes it "production ready" which means it's fully supported by F5. And if that wasn't enough, it's also certified by RedHat for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6.x.

Of course this isn't the end of our OpenStack story; there's more cooking right now that we'll be ready to talk about later this year. So stay tuned.

If you can't attend OpenStack Summit or just want to keep track of us during the show, you can follow us on twitter @f5networks. And don't forget to keep track of what's going on throughout the week by tracking #OpenStack and following the summit on Twitter.