Agility 2014–Lab Day and the Inaugural Geekfest!
This year’s kick off for the labs was amazing. Customers and partners arrived Monday morning for a day and half of technical training, ranging from iRules and other programmability exercises to hard core deep dives into Secure Web Gateway, Application Policy Manager, Viprion, and more. The week started far earlier for most of the tech team. John and I arrived Sunday afternoon, but the core team that made this year such a rousing success arrived Friday and spent the bulk of the weekend prepping gear and rooms and then testing everything to ensure Monday was spent on the important stuff—equipping attendees. I can’t say enough good things about the team simply willing this toward excellence, and all the feedback I’ve received has been fantastic. I had the privilege of sharing teaching duties in the iRules 201 class with several of F5’s finest sales engineers, as did John in the iRules 101 class. The classes were packed across the board. For the iRules courses, all material (lab exercises, presentations, etc) is in the DevCentral downloads section, linked below for your convenience. I’ll add the other labs as the teams share their documents. Agility 2014 iRules 101 Agility 2014 iRules 201 Agility 2014 iRules 301 After training, John emceed a couple hours of invite-only tech goodness we’re calling geekfest. John came prepared to sing, dance, and read emo poetry as ice breakers, but it turns out this community likes to talk. Quite a few people stepped forward to share what they learned or loved about F5. It was a little tough to hear at times, so I won’t claim direct quotes here, but to share the paraphrases: - “I had no idea you could use the iControl REST API to configure an LTM…it’s amazing to know how fast and efficient it is” - ”I learned more in one day attending the Agility labs than I have in 5 years of trying all this on my own” - ”We run several web applications and it’s awesome that we can use GTM to show the outside world one IP address for them all…it makes things so much simpler” - ”I’m brand new to F5 technology and I’m already in love with DevCentral…what a huge differentiator and great resource for all my technical questions!” - ”F5 is the swiss army knife of network appliances…it can do ANYTHING!” - ”You can literally do anything with an iRule…the flexibility and power is amazing” Agility is one of my favorite events for a couple reasons. First, it’s an opportunity to mingle with a ton of people, exchanging ideas, networking, building relationships, etc. Second, customers and partners get a broad spectrum of technical resources in a short amount of time. Whether it’s lab day training classes or break out sessions, the quality content and interaction is an unstoppable force. If you haven’t been to an Agility event, I highly recommend you make the trip next year to Washington, DC. I promise a 5 minute dance video by John that you will not be disappointed! Oh, and for all you members out there that swung by the DevCentral booth to say hi (still have a shot 5-7 tonight!) we'll float you 25 devpoints!
