DevCentral's Featured Member for July - Sebastián Sierra Domínguez
Our Featured Member series is a way for us to show appreciation and highlight active contributors in our community. Communities thrive on interaction and ourFeatured Seriesgives you some insight on some of our most engaged folks. DevCentral Member Sebastián Sierra Domínguezis our Featured Member for July! He's been on a tear lately with helping other members so let's catch up with Sebastián! DevCentral: First, please explain to the DC community a little about yourself, what you do and why it is important. Sebastián: Good morning, Good Afternoon, and Good Evening to everyone, my name is Sebastián Sierra Domínguez I am a system engineer in love with F5 technologies. I live in Spain but I´m originally from Colombia, I packed my baggage more than 3 years ago and decide to leave my life in Colombia and start a new life in Spain one of the most remarkable decisions in my life. I started with F5 solutions since 2015 and from this day I never stopped learning new things and expanding my knowledge. In my free time, I like going to work out, cycling, jogging, playing basketball, roller skating, and other things that represent a good lifestyle, because we keep many times seated for a lot of hours working. DevCentral: You’ve been an active contributor in the DevCentral community. What keeps you involved? Sebastián: Well, DevCentral for me was always one of the best free communities with difference from other vendors, and I decided to keep involved because when you help other people, at the same time you are reinforcing your knowledge and creating new "a win to win", in many times I have to turn on an F5 device to test a feature and found a solution to help the community. and absolutely because this community around the years provided me always support and I think that this type of platform must keep working always and with the help of everyone we can make it's possible. DevCentral: Tell us a little about the technical expertise you have. Sebastián: For the last 8 years, I have been working dedicated to F5 deployments with all the different modules in F5, BIG-IP LTM, ASM, GTM-LC, APM, AFM,BIG-IQ, and Advanced Protocols, but life was not beautiful always, I had a lot of works as technical support, SW and FW administrator, Linux operator, probably the best base to be a humble person who always listens to fist the customer and try to meet all their requirements. DevCentral: You are a Security Specialist atLogicalis Spain. Can you describe your typical workday, how you manage work/life balance and the strong support of F5 solutions? How has the pandemic impacted your work? Sebastián: At Logicalis I help our clients to develop and deploy F5 products to meet technology necessities, government requirements, security improvement, and many other use cases. I start my day with a good coffee from Colombia, I read my emails and prepare all the necessary meetings with my customers for the different projects that I have to meet, I deploy many labs, test a lot of configurations and probably this is one of the reasons that makes me participate constantly in the DevCentral community, I'm always looking to extend and improve the deployments with my customer to give the best customer service, one of my personal focus in each project. Covid-19 changed my life absolutely, before pandemic I always woke up early and prepare for going to the office, and now everything is different, work remotely is an amazing benefit, but trying to keep a good lifestyle when you are all day in the home is fundamental, balance your work and time for your self is not always easy but is important keep always in mind because personal time and family time is one of the most important things in life. DevCentral: Do you have any F5 Certifications? If so, why are these important to you and how have they helped with your career? Sebastián: I'm 401-CSE security and 402-CSE cloud around 4 years ago and I always re-certify my exams, it is important for my company for many customer processes, and of course, it is important for me because it helps you to differentiate from other candidates in interviews for example, and this was the key point that helps me to move to Spain with a work permit, so yes, it helps me to improve my life and my career opportunities and I only can to thank the incredible work from the Dr. KJ (Ken) Salchow and their amazing certification team. DevCentral: Describe one of your biggest Customer challenges and how the community helped in that situation. Sebastián: Well, I think that is difficult to determine what is the biggest customer challenge that the community helps me to solve. because I continue using the public F5 resources such as AskF5 and Devcentral to improve and solve many issues that I found in my customers day to day. and of course, I have to mention the technical support that provides F5, probably one of the best of all vendors, I always call F5 support when I have a critical issue, and in 80% of the cases I solving the issue with their help. DevCentral: Lastly, if you weren’t doing what you’re doing – what would be your dream career? Or better yet, when you were a kid – what did you want to be when you grew up? Sebastián: Becoming a system engineer was my second plan in life, I always liked machine function and mechanical engineering was my first plan but unfortunately, I didn't have the opportunity to study this career. And today I think that my knowledge allows me to use all the F5 modules to develop solutions that help to improve the security and functionality of my customer's applications, and in other perspectives, this is like building a machine taking pieces of software that makes a specific function. ---Thanks Sebastián! The DC Community really appreciate your willingness to share with the DevCentral Community. Stay connected with Sebastián on social media: Sebastián on LinkedIn Logicalis on Twitter Logicalis on LinkedInCertified Kubernetes Administrator - Study Group
I recently completed my CKA and want to encourage others as I was encouraged. To that end, I'm going to facilitate a study group that will kick off the week of April 24th. Requirements You're welcome to join in on the fun for weeks 1 and 2, but you must register for the exam by week 3 and set a test date to continue on with the study group. Commitment is key! The exam is $395 but I have a code that should get you 50% off if you register in the first two weeks of our study group. You will sign up for a week of material to learn and share with the group what you learned, and walk the group through the lab exercises that challenged you the most and what you learned from them. You'll commit the time to study, it's a lot of material to learn You'll show up for and participate in meetings (with the understanding that life happens) Material The only required material for this study group is the Certified Kubernetes Administrator with Practice Tests course on Udemy. It is $35, but sometimes it's discounted, I think I got it at $19 when I registered. In the course material, there is a coupon that will unlock the CKA course labs for free on KodeCloud.com. Schedule As far as time is concerned, I know that will be tricky. I'm available most days Tuesday-Friday between 3pm - 6pm central. We can nail down a timeslot once everyone interested is set. From a weekly perspective, you can expect about 3-4 hours of course content, plus the labs, plus any additional studying you might do on your own. Week Date Concepts 1 April 24th Introduction | Core Concepts 2 May 1st Scheduling | Logging & Monitoring | Storage 3 May 8th Application Lifecycle Management | Cluster Maintenance 4 May 15th Security 5 May 22nd Review | Killer.sh Lab Attempt #1 6 May 29th Networking 7 June 5th Designing & Installing a Cluster | Installing the kubeadm way | Troubleshooting 8 June 12th Mock Exams | Killer.sh Lab Attempt #2 9 June 19th Prep for / take your exam Any questions on the exam, the material, the study group, drop them below. I hope to see you the week of April 24th! If you want to join, send me a DM here on DevCentral or shoot me an email at j.rahm@f5.comand I'll add you to the group. First group I'll likely limit to the first 8-10 to keep it small enough to encourage conversation.DevCentral's Featured Member for August - Tofunmi Olorunju
Our Featured Member series is a way for us to show appreciation and highlight active contributors in our community. Communities thrive on interaction and ourFeatured Seriesgives you some insight on some of our most engaged folks. DevCentral MemberTofunmi Olorunjuis our Featured Member for August! He's been helping many other members with some great tips so let's catch up with Tofunmi!DevCentral's Featured Member for April - Scott Campbell
Our Featured Member series is a way for us to show appreciation and highlight active contributors in our community. Communities thrive on interaction and ourFeatured Seriesgives you some insight on some of our most engaged folks. DevCentral Member and 2022 MVP Scott Campbellis our Featured Member for March! Let's catch up with Scott! DevCentral: First, please explain to the DC community a little about yourself, what you do and why it is important. Scott: I am labelled a Senior Network Analyst and work at the lovely campus of the University of Victoria in Victoria, BC, Canada. I’ve been in my current role for 17 years and working with F5 LTM for at least 15 years. I enjoy working with our different teams and finding solutions to providing services to our students and staff. I seem to be good at grasping the bigger picture and how all the pieces can work together. Outside of work I enjoy working on and around my house, spending time with my family and friends, and for the last couple years, quilting. I enjoy creating and working with my hands which is why I am often renovating, gardening, canning, baking, sewing, quilting etc. DevCentral: You’ve been an active contributor in the DevCentral community. What keeps you involved? Scott: DevCentral is full of many wonderful people and a vast amount of knowledge. I have used the forum archives often when looking for examples of how to implement a solution or how others would write an irule to address a problem. The irule/TCL documentation was my main resource on learning TCL over the years and expanding our set of irules. DevCentral: Tell us a little about the technical expertise you have. Scott: Too many years ago I received my bachelors in Computer Science and Economics from the University of Victoria. In my current position I am the network SME for DNS, DHCP, Cisco Telephony, F5 LTM/ASM/APM and a suite of perl tools. Almost 25 years as a senior administrator/analyst with a lot of programming, scripting and just making things work. Through the F5 User Groups, I have given a number of presentations about different aspects of the University’s F5 and different solutions we have been able to provide with the F5 technologies. Sharing with other local users is a good way to connect with others in your F5 community. DevCentral: You are a Senior Network Analyst at the University of Victoria. Can you describe your typical workday, how you manage work/life balance and the strong support of F5 solutions? How has the recent pandemic impacted your work? Scott: I start early in the day which allows me to do any out of business hours changes first, APM policy work, ASM transitions and larger irule or LTM policy changes. The rest of my day is full of different project work, troubleshooting issues that arise and planning any future development or project work that would benefit the University. The pandemic has oddly provided a number of very good opportunities for me to learn and expand my F5 knowledge. With the almost complete forced evacuation of campus back in 2020, our whole systems team was tasked with making the “UVic-from-home” experience as secure and easy as possible for our staff and students. We moved a number of our student computer labs behind F5 APM as well as a multi-entry point APM policy for staff and RDP sessions. APM is now also being used for many MFA implementations for staff to access protected resources. Through mutual agreement I continued to work on campus full time throughout the pandemic which gave me a very quiet environment and allowed me to focus on the large amount of work to be done. DevCentral: Do you have any F5 Certifications? If so, why are these important to you and how have they helped with your career? Scott: Yes, I just renewed my 301b since I didn’t take time during the last two years to move forward from there. I would like to get a 400 level certification before I have to renew my 301b again. I believe they are a good representation that you know a breadth of information for that level. Studying for 201 certification brought me in contact with Philip Jönsson as he was finishing up production of “F5 Networks - TMOS Administration Study Guide” (with Steven Iveson). I ended up proofreading the entire book for him and connecting with him on a personal level. We got to meet in person the following year at F5 Agility and had some good discussions on our F5 experiences. I was also invited to F5 headquarters in Seattle to take part in a 101 Item Development Workshop where a group of us went through all the 101 certification questions and verified their validity and created new questions for the certification database with an updated blueprint. This was also an amazing opportunity to be involved with F5 and learn the development and backend of the certification process. DevCentral: Describe one of your biggest Customer challenges and how the community helped in that situation. Scott: The first larger challenge where I needed help (and connected with DevCentral) was when we originally put MS Exchange behind the F5 many many years ago. The F5/MS white paper was really good but the DevCentral forms filled in a number of gaps since our installation did not match the white paper installation and some customizations were required to make it work with our environment. Other people had modified monitors and modified the persistence irule to better lockdown different aspects of Exchange. DevCentral also gave me tips on how to see the traffic that was not behaving as expected and how to manipulate it with different policies and configuration. DevCentral: Finally, if you weren’t doing what you’re doing – what would be your dream career? Or better, when you were a kid – what did you want to be when you grew up? Scott: I think my first dream job was wanting to run a gas (O2, H) station on Mars, at least 100 years before my time it seems. Other than that I love making things work and putting things together. I have been in this position for 17 years and still really enjoy engaging with others and putting together a configuration of certs, irules, policies and pools to make their applications secure and available. The university environment is constantly changing, upgrading and looking forward to seeing how to make the staff and student experience better, which is a great thing to feel a part of. As for F5, I have found many ways to engage with the company and other customers and hope to find some new ways in the future. ---ThanksScott!We really appreciate your willingness to share with the DevCentral Community. Stay connected withScotton social media: Scott on LinkedIn University of VictoriaDevCentral's Featured Member for November - Mohamed Salah
Our Featured Member series is a way for us to show appreciation and highlight active contributors in our community. Communities thrive on interaction and ourFeatured Seriesgives you some insight on some of our most engaged folks. F5 Community Member Mohamed Salahis our DevCentral Featured Member for November! He's been helping many other members with some great tips so let's catch up with Mohamed!ICYMI on DevCentral - June 2022
DevCentral publishes a lot of articles and videos each month so it's easy for interesting content to get lost on the timeline. Here's a snapshot of the top viewed articles and videos from June 2022, in case you missed it! Solved on the Technical Forum ASM Captcha for registering page (not login page) - possible or APM modul needed? with an accepted solution from Nikoolayy1 F5 VS PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERRORwith an accepted solution fromNikoolayy1 Bgp inside ipsec tunnelwith an accepted solution fromNikoolayy1 guys license issue with f5 eve ng image 15.1.0with an accepted solution frombuulam iRulewith an accepted solution fromSebastiansierra Huge thanks to everyone who offered solutions on the Technical Forum this month. I'd like to give an extra special shout out to our MVPNikoolayy1 for truly being a rock star resource in the community. Thanks for making our community great! F5 Technical Articles: From GSLB to Modern Apps in the Cloud: A Transition Plan for Distributed Cloud.byAubreyKingF5 F5 Labs uncovers new Android malware strain MaliBotbywarburtr0n How to integrate Web Application and API Protection service with Palo Alto Firewalls in AWSbyChris_Zhang F5 SIRT This Week in Security: Folina Zero Day, Karakurt and more byRebecca_Moloney JavaScript Supply Chains, Magecart, and F5 XC Client-Side Defense (Demo) byKyle_Roberts Thanks to all the F5 technical SMEs for sharing lessons learned and best practices with the DevCentral community! If you'd like to see a Technical Article about a topic in particular, please let us know in the comments. Demos and Livestreams Ted_Byerlyshows how to Deploy a Basic OWASPTop 10 for 2021 Declarative WAFPolicy. BIG-IP has been updated to show the latest OWASP Top 10 for 2021. Take a look at the changes and see how easy using a declarative WAF policy it is to become compliant. PSilvais joined by Peter Scheffler at RSA 2022 toto discuss considerations with zero trust strategies inAsk the Expert: What is Zero Trust? buulamtalks with Maruli Palanisamy, Chief Solutions Officer with AppViewX, at RSA 2022 to go over how AppViewX products can help with the full automation of application lifecycle in an F5 environment. AubreyKingF5walked down memory lane to show a technique that he used with a customer to add BGP configurations as part of a CI/CD pipeline that was managed with OpenStackand Red Hat Ansible Automation. If you have a VR headset, take a virtual walk with buulamand PSilvathrough the RSA Conference 2022 Expo Floor! See you next month! Huge thanks to everyone who contributed to the community in June. If you have any ideas or suggestions, don't hesitate to pop over and write a comment in ourSuggestionsbox. See you out there in the community!GlueCon 2022 Recap - Are in-person conferences a thing again?
[Scroll down for accompanying videos] Over the past 2 years, I've seen many events in our industry take a shot at delivering a virtual experience. Let's face it, though, virtual events are not the same. Why? You miss "The Hallway Track". This is the name of the informal chats outside of the formal talk tracks. This is where you meet up with your colleagues and share recaps of the last sessions you just attended. Or you grab one of the speakers after their talk and ask a couple more questions about the subject that they just passionately spoke about. Or you visit vendor booths and get their view on how they see the world and see if it aligns with what you're working on. Or you see someone sitting alone at a table for lunch, you decide to sit down and make an effort to get to know someone new. I've done all of these things and I know that this is where I have learned the most. For two years, we lost the opportunity to fully experience The Hallway Track. When I saw that NGINX was sponsoring GlueCon 2022 and saw how well the agenda aligned with my areas of technical focus, I immediately made a case to get out there. And now having just gotten back and reflecting on my experience there, I can say I was extremely happy that GlueCon was my first time back at an in-person conference. GlueCon is a unique conference in that it is focused on delivering high-quality technical content to developers. They don't want the sales pitches, even though I could see hints of sales pitches were snuck in to some presentations but done in a tasteful way (let's face it, the vendors need to justify the sponsorship money that funds a lot of the conference so let's give them a minute so they're inspired to invest more in future). The talks this year ranged from APIs, Observability, Serverless Technologies, Authentication, Service Mesh, Developer Tools and even some Blockchain and Web3. There were also some interesting high level talks on Cloud-Native Organizations and Product Managing Your Infrastructure. What I took away from the event is that developers have a few big things they worry about. Getting code to work in the first place Getting code up and running on their infrastructure Observability of the application and keeping it safe and secure What this also means is that developers do not have the time to mess around with solutions that are a burden to implement. There is incredible pressure to deliver on time and they need solutions that "Just Works" whether that's accomplished through great documentation, great example code or great service/support. This was confirmed by the conversations I was having with individuals. By looking them in the eye when they shared horror stories of sleepless nights and failed deploys. By listening to their specific needs before I said anything about our own products to them. By trying to relate in whatever way I could to their day to day lives in the trenches. Doing this in person is difficult to replace even if you have every tool available to you so I look forward to meeting up with some of you one day for The Hallway Track. P.S. Here's some of the videos I've created from the week:
DevCentral Content Highlights
New to DevCentral and curious about what we're all about? Below you'll find a list of some of our most popular content to get your started! Table of contents: Articles: Some highlights from community: Lightboard Lesson videos (appx 10 minutes each): Livestream shows (30-60 minutes each): Articles: What Is BIG-IP? #The101: Introduction to F5 Technology and Terms Getting Started With iRules article series iRules Editor with Visual Studio Code Layer 4 vs Layer 7 DoS Attack Mitigating New Gadget Leveraging JNDI Injection into Remote Code Execution Using Advanced WAF Understanding IPSec IKEv1 negotiation on Wireshark How to Get a F5 Trial or Lab License Get Started with BIG-IP Virtual Edition (VE), BIG-IQ VE or BIG-IP Cloud Edition Trial Some highlights from community: BigIP Report Inserting SSL client certificate into the header of the HTTP session How to Check logs on F5 for troubleshooting purpose Lightboard Lesson videos (appx 10 minutes each): LTM Load Balancing Algorithms: Round Robin, Ratio, & Dynamic Ratio HTTP Cookie SameSite Attribute CPU Hyper-Threads & TMM Elliptic Curve Cryptography Overview 2021 OWASP Top Ten: Injection Livestream shows (30-60 minutes each): DevCentral Connects: Extending VS Code DevCentral Connects: AS3 Config Converter DevCentral Connects: Prepare to D.I.E. DevCentral Connects: The SHAPE of Things An Inside Look at the MITRE ATT&CK FrameworkDevCentral Visits - GovWare Conference and Exhibition 2022 - Singapore - October 18 - 20, 2022
For those of you in the Asia region,buulam(me but in the third person so I can tag myself😁) will be checking out GovWare 2022 in Singapore! GovWare is Asia's Premier Cybersecurity event. It draws close to 10,000 attendees from over 50 countries! It takes place October 18 - 20. I'll be putting out a lot of the content that you're hopefully getting used to seeing when DevCentral Visits an event. Also, Singapore is a major tech hub in Asia so I'm hoping to show some of that to our audience. I'm also really looking forward to featuring the uniqueness of F5's presence in Asia. We have a major office there and many of our brightest people and thought leaders are based in Singapore. You can be sure that I'm aiming to get a lot of face time with them. Stay tuned!
