Welcome to our Featured F5er series. For August we are delighted to spotlight Steve Gorman, an exceptional contributor to DevCentral!
DevCentral: To start, please introduce yourself and tell our community a little about yourself. What you do and why is it important?
Steve: I am a Canadian F5er, based in Ottawa. I have five years on the job at F5, by company standards of tenure that is still basically rookie territory. Luckily, I have a number of more years in the industry as a whole. My focus is to find interesting and complementary solutions for F5 tech, for instance key and certificate solutions that enhance F5 products like BIG-IP, or storage vendors where F5 solutions can create robust and scalable S3 solutions. It’s important work as customers are in the business of solving problems and the needed solutions intuitively will often span individual products.
DevCentral: As a Solutions Architect at F5, what is your typical workday like?
Steve: I invest heavily in independent research, scrounging for interesting news items that cover both technology trends and industry news…I enjoy the autonomy of my role. I am trying to keep abreast of where enterprise and cloud networks are evolving to, to find the next useful partnership story to invest in. I work with my engineering counter parts at other vendors, usually business development resources, from whom I learn the nuts and bolts of their latest offerings and thinking. It has to be a two-way street, of course, I will often guide the counterpart through various F5 configurations and best practice. It’s really interesting when the individual is a subject matter expert, but in a completely different realm than my own, such as big data or advanced storage with real “hands-on-keyboard” know how; it’s like going back to school but immediately starting with a tutorial from the people who “wrote the book on it”.
DevCentral: Can you give us a glimpse into your technical expertise?
Steve: In much of my career I have been focused on network monitoring and debug tools, from ruggedized capture appliances you could throw under the seat on a plane to today’s opensource approaches like Wireshark. I also have a lot of lab time built up testing performance parameters, like trying to benchmark device throughput or perhaps routing table capacity or learning rate. It’s a great way to buttress your knowledge at the lowest common denominator, when you are tasked with learning the nuances of protocols like BGP-4, OSPF or MPLS signaling…it helps ground you in meaningful conversations even sometimes years later in your career.
DevCentral: What’s something exciting you’re working on right now?
Steve: Two things come to mind, one is a take on the “what is old is new again” story. F5 has a premier solution in web server load balancing, often associated with website scale out over many years. However, object storage that is S3 API compatible is really just an extension to the technology. All of the tips, tricks and best practice around scaling and protecting HTTP workflows are entirely top of mind once again in 2026 as AI Data Delivery frequently leverages scalable S3 clusters. I’m also tasked with staying current on the rapidly evolving Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) space, it’s refreshing to be getting in on the ground floor when we are all trying to see how things will flesh out.
DevCentral: What’s a milestone you’re aiming to achieve in the near future?
Steve: I am trying to get more stick time with Agentic AI. I have in the past built and documented on DevCentral some generative AI solutions, things frequently involving RAG and tapping into F5 partners to provide the storage angle. That being for the corpus of documents to “feed the (AI) machine”. Right now, I’m working on AI agents, I have used a number of low code vendors so far, to do tasks aligned with my research. The low hanging fruit is to automate overnight discovery of blogs, news releases and industry articles around current and potentially new partners. It will help see through the noise and present a sort of daily top-ten list of innovation going on in our industry.
DevCentral: What has been your most memorable project or achievement at F5?
Steve: Just recently I started going back to basics with use cases around global server load balancing. The maturity and sort of hidden gem features in a product like BIG-IP DNS is fascinating. I’ve found active-active support of object data clusters is really something in demand, the fact that one can cleverly steer traffic to the optimal landing spot, based on things like your country, continent, number of network hops….you can even use long term probing to “guesstimate” which data center will be fastest to reach. If you can find satisfaction making a lab setup perform as expected, this is a great role to be in.
DevCentral: As an F5er who participates in the DevCentral community how has it helped or influenced your work?
Steve: I like that the prime directive at DevCentral is seemingly technical learning, beyond anything else. A lot of the content I most appreciate is the early exploration content, not always fully baked. I always like titles that start informally, such as “What I Learned…..”. I tried to write an MCP-based article using F5 Distributed Cloud and a Postgres database instantiated on a storage partner; it was the early days of MCP, essentially a new land rush. It didn’t have to be comprehensive but moved the bar a bit, with a working configuration that augmented AI with real-time knowledge. I keep on the lookout for new industry ideas finding a beach head in lab environments.
DevCentral: Are there any challenges that community has helped you overcome? If so, what was it and how did community help? (Does not have to be DevCentral related)
Steve: Quite often what I would call niche setups, or corner cases if you will, are already documented on sites like DevCentral. There are many examples, perhaps due to recency bias I think of ACME. BIG-IP 21.1.0 introduced ACME v2 client directly into the GUI, however ACME has been supported through some ancillary code documented on DevCentral for more than two years now, for early adopters who might want to explore the protocol. Also, unlike a minimalist GitHub approach where code might simply be made available, with DevCentral there is always a good technical foundational review that goes hand-in-hand with providing configuration steps. This is the key, learning and actionable steps from the best articles.
DevCentral: What do you do to maintain work life balance?
Steve: It can help when you have a passion for the topics that you are researching, it seems less like real work when you can read a new blog in the evening and enjoy an “aha” moment or two when you learn something new and interesting. For balance I read fiction, often police procedurals, nothing highbrow, so it’s quite easy to lose yourself for an hour or two. Our son is a teenage hockey goalie, so we spend a lot of time in and out of season travelling to tournaments he is in. It gets you to areas you might not see, I’m writing this currently from outside Cornell’s arena in beautiful Ithaca, NY. It’s one way to spend a lot of time with a teen, become a critical cog in their transportation needs and let them pursue a passion.
DevCentral: If you weren’t in your current profession what would be your dream job?
Steve: In high school and university I maximized taking electives in the area of history. I’ve always thought some of the most impassioned educators I had where those trying to convey the reality of life in a different time and place. My father was a university professor for 25 years and even in retirement he was on campus all the time. It seems like teaching coupled with research can be a personally rewarding path to follow.
DevCentral: If you were transported into any movie or show what would it be and why?
Steve: Although I’d be interested in spending a day in the world of the “The Wire”, trying to talk some sense into “Jimmy McNulty” again, due to recency bias, I wouldn’t mind spending some time on the super yacht in “Succession” and having some deep conversation “Cousin Greg”. His command of the English language in front of the congressional inquiry was priceless.
DevCentral: If music played when you entered a room, what song would it be? Why?
Steve: As a Canadian we have a tradition of producing a long line of singer-songwriters. Some are less known internationally, the late Stan Rogers for instance, and some are household names, like Jonie Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. Probably take your pick of a half-dozen Gordon Lightfoot songs, you can’t go wrong with “Bitter Green”, get your handkerchief ready.
DevCentral: What empowers you?
Steve: In anything, from work tasks to trying to change a garage door opener or assembling a propane barbeque, I like the transition from challenging, difficult objectives to a set of simpler statements. Methodical and incrementally working towards a solution. The risk that one might fall flat on their face is always there, but usually taking a moment to think out the next two to three steps in any undertaking will avert disaster. Getting things done with no extra parts left over is just a bonus.
DevCentral: Finally, what’s a question you would like to ask the members of our community?
Steve: What is an impressive networking feature you may never have yet used but have always wanted to explore? I’ve personally found the topic of Connection Mirroring in BIG-IP notable. A lot of network gear offers fast recovery through device failover, granted your sessions will need to restage. I don’t, however, recall a similar feature to Connection Mirroring where it actually keep state on an established TCP connection and distributes that information. When a device fails, is replaced by a counterpart, traffic just keeps flowing. Talk about setting the bar high in terms of a truly always up service.
- Connect with Steve on LinkedIn
Thank you Steve for allowing us to spotlight you for August! And to everyone I would love to see how you would answer Steve’s question in the comments.