Deploying F5 BIG-IP in AWS for Developers

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F5’s BYOL (Bring Your Own License) model allows you to purchase a developer/lab license and install into AWS. This model provides a stable development instance for the following software components of BIG-IP:  LTM, GTM, DNS, AFM, ASM, APM Lite (10 users), AAM, CGN, SSL Forward Proxy, Advanced Protocols, and Crypto Offload all at a 10Mbps rate limit.

Please refer to these resources to get started in AWS

• How to get a F5 BIG-IP VE Developer Lab License
• F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition Setup Guide for AWS @ support.f5.com
• AWS Marketplace:  F5 Networks Products @ Amazon 
• Amazon EC2 Instances @ Amazon

Recommended AWS Instance Types for Developer and Lab Environments

vCPU:  Virtualized CPU resources
ECU:  Amazon-defined measurements of CPU predicted performance determined by current commodity hardware
EBS:  Elastic Block Storage providing commodity-backed availability-zone replicated block storage

NOTE: DevCentral recommends  2 core instances with RAM varying between 3.75 and 15GB depending on your development and lab needs.  DevCentral uses m3.large as it gives us 2vCPU, roughly 8GB RAM and fast storage for good disk speeds when we crank up logging.  There are plenty of other options to suit your need and we recommend these for development work only.  Staging and production environments should be based on F5 recommended instance sizes using the Good/Better/Best BYOL licensing options.