The BIG-IP and Ansible Sandbox, The Perfect Automation Playground!

Ever need a sandbox area to validate and test your F5 BIG-IP Automation? Well look no further! Ansible and F5 have worked together to create a deployable sandbox solution for all your testing needs within AWS.

Why do I need a sandbox environment?

In most use cases playbooks are never perfect out of the box. We all need an area to test that code and run through many different scenarios to ensure that the code is fully functional, does error detection/correction and doesn't create outages on an environment; All of which needs to be done before that code gets pushed to production.

Setting up that kind of lab can take time to setup/configure and can even be problematic to reset back to a "Factory Default" configuration. Having that ability to reset the infrastructure to a clean state that also has the unique add-ons necessary for your testing, makes the lab reusable for testing new or older builds of code.

So Where do I Start?

Best place to get started is in the F5 Cloud Docs website https://clouddocs.f5.com/training/automation-sandbox/

The website will help with the following

Information on setting up the prerequisites (installing Docker, setting up IAM account in AWS, Route 53 Domain, etc.
Using the provided DockerFile code to deploy a local container that will be the control node for deploying the AWS environment.
Commands to download the Git repository for the Red Hat Automation Platform Workshops (https://github.com/ansible/workshops/)
Commands execute the code to deploy or destroy a sandbox Automation Workshop with an F5 Configuration on AWS
Basic (101) and advanced (201) use cases.

From there the sky is the limit! The sandbox is the perfect automation playground to test any code you might have.

What will the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Workshops build with the F5 configuration?

As per the diagram below the Ansible Automation Platform Workshops will build out and configure an AWS VPC, an Ansible Host, a BIG-IP (Best Licensed) and two Web Servers. The entire environment will be built and configured during the deployment. Each device within the VPC will also have a public IP and private IP addresses for intranet access between the nodes and external internet accessibility for importing and testing playbooks and configurations.

When all the code is run and the lab is built, it will provide the essential information related on how to connect to the environment

Workshop Name - Unique identifier that was provided in the variables file
Instructor Inventory - The hostnames with the public and private IP addresses to connect to the environment with.
Private Key - If you wish to use SSH authentication to the Nodes