2024 DevCentral MVP Announcement
Congratulations to the 2024 DevCentral MVPs! The DevCentral MVP Award is given annually to the outstanding group of experts in the technical F5 user community who go out of their way to engage with the user community. The award is our way of recognizing their significant contributions, because while all of our users collectively make DevCentral one of the top community sites around and a valuable resource for everyone, MVPs regularly go above and beyond in assisting fellow F5 practitioners by sharing their deep technical experience and knowledge. MVPs get badges in their DevCentral and Reddit profiles so everyone can see that they are recognized experts. They also receive MVP swag, and invitations to regular exclusive webinars and behind-the-scenes looks at things like roadmaps, new product sneak-previews, and innovative concepts in development at F5. DevCentral is grateful for and proud to recognise the technical knowledge and exemplary community engagement of these 43 outstanding community members: Amine_Kadimi Amr_Ali Austin_Geraci boneyard Bryan_T_ CA_Valli Daniel_Wolf Dario_Garrido Enes_Afsin_Al F5_Design_Engineer jaikumar_f5 Jim_Schwartzme1 JoseLabra JoshBecigneul Juergen_Mang Kai_Wilke KeesvandenBos Kevin_Davies Lidev lnxgeek LouisK Mayur_Sutare Michael_Saleem mihaic Mike757 Mohamed_Ahmed_Kansoh Mohamed_Salah_ Niels_van_Sluis Nikoolayy1 P_Kueppers Patrik_Jonsson Paulius PhatANhappy Philip_Jonsson PSFletchTheTek Rodolfo_Nützmann Samir ScottE Sebastian_Mani1 Sebastiansierra StephanManthey Tofunmi Whisperer2023 DevCentral MVP Announcement
Congratulations to the 2023 DevCentral MVPs! Without users who take time from their busy days to share their experience and knowledge for others, DevCentral couldn't be the helpful user community that it is today. To that end, the DevCentral MVP Award is given annually to the outstanding group of experts in the technical F5 user community who go out of their way to engage with the user community. The award is our way of recognizing their significant contributions, because while all of our users collectively make DevCentral one of the top community sites around and a valuable resource for everyone, MVPs regularly go above and beyond in assisting fellow F5 users. 2022 was tough in a lot of ways, and we are extra-grateful to this year's MVPs for taking the time and making the effort to help others. MVPs get badges in their DevCentral and Reddit profiles so everyone can see that they are recognized experts. This year’s MVPs will receive thank-you gifts, and invitations to regular exclusive webinars and behind-the-scenes looks at things like roadmaps, new product sneak-previews, and innovative concepts in development. The 2023 DevCentral MVPs are: AlexBCT Amine_Kadimi Austin_Geraci boneyard Bryan_T_ CA_Valli Dario_Garrido Donald_J_Ross Edouard Enes_Afsin_Al F5_Design_Engineer iaine jaikumar_f5 Jim_Schwartzme1 JoshBecigneul Juergen_Mang Kai_Wilke KeesvandenBos Kevin_Davies Lidev lnxgeek LouisK Mayur_Sutare mihaic Mike757 Mohamed_Ahmed_Kansoh Mohamed_Salah_ neeeewbie Niels_van_Sluis Nikoolayy1 P_Kueppers Patrik_Jonsson Paulius Philip_Jonsson PSFletchTheTek Rodolfo_Nützmann Rodrigo_Albuque Samir spalande ScottE Sebastian_Maniak Sebastiansierra StephanManthey Tofunmi xuwen2026 F5 DevCentral MVP Announcement
DevCentral exists as a thriving community for, and because of, our members. Every single day, talented people visit with a curiosity and desire to solve problems and share their expertise. This brings technical excellence to us all, and their spirit of generosity is what weaves together our individual threads into the tapestry of a global community. Some individuals stand out, demonstrating an extraordinary commitment. For over 15 years, DevCentral MVPs have represented the heart and soul of our community and year after year, we are in awe of the way these MVPs cultivate connections, both locally and globally. They are the most active voices, exemplary leaders, and the embodiment of a community-mindset. This dedication deserves credit and the F5 DevCentral MVP award is presented annually to recognize these most outstanding contributors. We are therefore proud to announce the 2026 F5 DevCentral MVP cohort. Many continue a legacy of sustained dedication while others are new this year. Please join us in celebrating our new and returning the 2026 DevCentral MVPs: Aswin_mk Austin_Geraci boneyard neeeewbie CA_Valli Daniel_Wolf Enes_Afsin_Al whisperer Jim_Schwartzme1 JoseLabra JoshBecigneul Juergen_Mang Kai_Wilke KeesvandenBos Injeyan_Kostas m_dun Mayur_Sutare Michael_Saleem mihaic zamroni777 Mohamed_Ahmed_Kansoh Amine_Kadimi Niels_van_Sluis Nikoolayy1 P_Kueppers Patrik_Jonsson Philip_Jonsson PhatANhappy F5_Design_Engineer Samir ScottE Sebastiansierra Sherouk lnxgeek Tofunmi tysmith Paulius Congratulations Congratulations and thank you to the F5 DevCentral MVPs for your acts of community. You make us all better. — Learn more about the F5 DevCentral MVP program and how to get involved.On Badges
Hello DevCentral Community. Today I am launching our main community badge schema. 📛 I have been sitting on this for a while waiting - I can wait no longer. I hope this is a fun way for you to see what you have been up to on DevCentral, for others to see how many places you've been on DevCentral, and for us all to be digitally recognized for just how much we are helping each other; everyday. You can see badges you have earned by navigating to your own My Profile. At launch (today) - I have set the default email notification to be in a daily-digest. Tomorrow (July 19) I will set the notification back to immediately so you may be notified about badges as you earn them. Many are earned as you engage on the site but some can be earned while you are away. If you want to change the default you can do so in My Settings > Subscriptions & Notifications > Notification Settings. (linked for convenience) Some details. The badges follow a basic pattern with 8 achievement levels for each category. Levels 1 and 2 are visible whether you have achieved them or not, for each of the 10 initial categories. Each category has a different measure. For example, the count of comments to achieve level 4 (Comment-licious) will be different from the count of Kudos given to achieve level 4 (Kudo-licious) and the higher the level, in each category, the harder "the bosses" get. 😄 A very few members, notably JRahm, PSilva, and a few MVP's (who have been around and very active for many years) have reached level 7 or 8 in just a couple of categories but, for the most part, levels 5, 6, 7, and 8 are still wide open. There for the taking. Enjoy, have fun, and the last thing I'll say is I'm not done with badges; special badges, one-offs, and maybe even a whole new category (or three) will come later. Thanks for being part of our community. Lief * "Badges? We ain't got no badges! We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinking badges!"Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Hi everyone, welcome to the new DevCentral! If you are reading this, there’s a good chance you have noticed some big changes to the site. This article will go over some of the changes, get you started, and introduce some of our new features. Another platform change? Why? Those of you who've been around a while know that the last major site change didn’t work out as we’d hoped for a variety of reasons. It has taken a while for us to prepare a solid fix, and we appreciate your patience and assistance in the process. In our ongoing effort to serve the DevCentral community as best we can, we’re proud to announce the launch of our new and improved site. What does this mean for me? For most users, you’ll simply need to adjust to the renovation and have fun exploring the new features we’re all excited about. A few of you may want to make some changes to your username or profile. OK, so what changed? TL;dr - you can skip on over to the Getting Started guide if you don't want to read through the changes listed below. Usernames: Spaces in usernames are not available going forward, and existing spaces in usernames have all been converted to underscores. For example, my old username “Leslie Hubertus” is now “Leslie_Hubertus” – and while everyone now has the option of changing their username, please note that spaces are no longer allowed. Additionally, if you had a really long handle (16+ characters), it has automatically been truncated to 15 characters. The system will automatically prompt you to update your username the first time you log in. You can leave it truncated if you wish, or change it at that time. If you decide to change your username , you can do so at any time by clicking on your profile picture in the top right of your screen, and clicking on My Settings. This will change the username associated with your profile and all your posts. Ranks: Our ranking schema has gone cloudy and we have added a few levels. You'll see everyone's rank next to their username. A quick note: 2 ranks override point-based ranking: MVP, and F5 employee. Do you have what it takes to get to Bespin? More info to come. Where did everything go? TL;dr Questions is now FORUMS Articles is now TECHNICAL ARTICLES CodeShare is now under the CrowdSRC umbrella Article Series can now be found by searching for "series," and we will be publishing an article with more information in days to come (and update this and the Getting Started articles accordingly). Questions has now become FORUMS: Technical Forum This is where you’ll post any technical questions or observations, just like you would have in the old Questions section. Water Cooler This is a new feature where the community can post about anything else (within the community guidelines). Want to talk about a particular Agility session, or general trending non-political news topics? Brag about your sweet home rig, or get advice on building one? This is the place to do that. Note: Posts, kudos, and comments in the Water Cooler do not count towards your rank – but good content is good content. When really good stuff happens around the Water Cooler we may move it to make it more prominent. Articles: Technical Articles This is where you will find, well, technical articles...go figure! These articles are written by F5ers, just like before. CrowdSRC This is dedicated to community-created and -contributed technical articles and code. It is a new and improved version of the old CodeShare. Code is of course still welcome and encouraged, but you can now also write free-form insights and solutions to share with the community. Note that the DevCentral team will review submissions prior to publishing, and all are subject to the community guidelines. DevCentral News This is a new featured section where you’ll find announcements, and other non-technical information from the team. Check here for Agility updates, contest announcements, team updates, and swag giveaways. Groups: This is a new feature we are excited about! Groups is a place for special groups to have conversations. The inaugural group is the MVP group, which is an invite-only place for our MVP cohort to converse with each other. We will be opening this feature to other groups slowly as we come to understand whether it serves the community well, For example, there may be potential for usergroups to have their own space in the community. We would love to hear what you think about the Groups feature. Events: This is another new feature we are excited about! This is where you’ll find links to things like Agility, webinars, trivia games, SME office hours, Livestream after-hour shows, and other events we’re planning for the community. Suggestions: Code syntax highlighting is now supported! Thanks to @MVP Kevin Davies for suggesting this feature! Whether you are creating an article or making a comment, here’s how to insert code: Click on the three dots to expand the toolbar: Click on Insert/Edit code sample, and you will see the following popup: OK, but what happened to my Follows, Bookmarks, and Private Messages? Unfortunately, we weren’t able to migrate this information on your behalf. Please read this article for more information. If you didn’t get notification about this ahead of time, and really need the name of that one article you rely on, please reach out to us at DevCentralFeedback@f5.com and someone on the team will reply directly to you. Unfortunately, while Private Messages continue to be a feature, we were not able to keep Private Message data across the migration. Follow is now Subscribe. How do I Subscribe to (formerly “Follow”) or Bookmark an article? Once you are in an article, you’ll see And At the top of each article, there are two options available to you. You can click on the small drop-down arrow or use the Options link with the three vertical dots. Once you do, you will see the menus as shown, where you can Bookmark (saved to a list on your profile) and Subscribe (get notified of article updates). How do I manage Bookmarks and Subscriptions? Click on your avatar in the top right of the page, then click on My Subscriptions, and it’ll take you directly to the relevant part of your My Settings page where you can Customize All The Things (related to your notification settings): Customize your experience! How do I find that article I really liked? Labels and Tags on this platform: Labels are enforced on new content and represent a very small set-list of high-level organization defined by us: Security, DevOps, Application Delivery etc. Tags are those free-form pieces that the author may contribute to their own post. You can interact with these components like this: (added tags are clickable/sortable too) You can subscribe to changes for any label (when you click on it) And you can see articles sorted by tags by clicking on them too. The red bar at the left of a post marks UNREAD. Important note on subscribing to tags: Subscribing to a tag is board specific, so if you want to see (for example) irules in articles and technical forum, you need to subscribe in both places. Fine, fine, but... How do I post a question, comment, or code? Please read this article for a primer on posting to the new DevCentral. Besides the editor being fairly intuitive, consistent, and easy to use, one new thing we’re happy about is that copying and pasting from into the text editor should no longer result in failarious formatting issues. You should also be able to write in multiple coding syntaxes now, including GO, ApacheConf, TCL, and nginx Guideslines and EULA, oh my Here are the DevCentral Community Guidelines, and this is our updated EULA. I’m still reading this. What's next, and where’s my cookie? We’re glad you stuck with us this long, and really hope you are happy with the changes. We do have more incremental changes planned, will be making further improvements as we go, and hope you will leave us a comment below or use the Suggestions page to share your input! As for cookies, well… that’s between you and your browser history.F5 AppWorld 2026 Las Vegas - iRules Contest Winners!
Grand Prize Winner - Injeyan_Kostas Rule: LLM Prompt Injection Detection & Enforcement Summary This iRule addresses the emerging threat of prompt injection attacks on AI APIs by implementing a real-time detection engine within the F5 BIG-IP platform. This iRule operates entirely within the data plane, requiring no backend changes, and enforces a configurable security policy to prevent malicious content from reaching language models. By utilizing a multi-layer scoring system and managing patterns externally, it allows security teams to fine-tune detection and adjust thresholds dynamically. 2nd Place - Marcio_G & svs Rule: AI Token Limit Enforcement Summary This iRule addresses the critical challenge of resource control in on-premise AI inference services by enforcing token budgets per user and role. By leveraging BIG-IP LTM iRules, it validates JWTs to extract user and role information, applying role-based token limits before requests reach the inference service. This ensures that organizations can manage and protect their AI infrastructure from uncontrolled usage without requiring additional modules or external gateways. 3rd Place - Daniel_Wolf Rule: JSON-query'ish meta language for iRules Summary This iRule addresses the complexity and inefficiency of JSON parsing in F5's BIG-IP iRules by introducing a framework that simplifies the process. It provides a set of procedures, [call json_get] and [call json_set], which allow developers to efficiently slice information in and out of JSON data structures with a clear and concise syntax. This approach not only reduces the need for deep JSON schema knowledge but also improves performance by approximately 20% per JSON request. Category Awards The (Don’t) Socket To Me Award - mcabral10 Because not every AI agent deserves a socket to speak into. Rule: Rate limiting WebSocket messages for Agents The Rogue Bot Throttle Jockey Award - TimRiker Wrangling distributed egress so your edge doesn't have to beg. Rule: AI/Bot Traffic Throttling iRule (UA Substring + IP Range Mapping) The Don't Lose the Thread Award - Antonio__LR_Mex & rod_b Session affinity for the age of streaming intelligence. Rule: LLM Streaming Session Pinning for WebSocket AI Gateways The 20 Lines or Less Award - BeCur In honor of Colin Walker - short on lines, long on legend. The scroll bar never stood a chance. Rule: Logging/Blocking possible prompt injection The Budget Bodyguard Award - Joe Negron Security hardening for those who write TCL instead of checks. Rule: Poor Man's WAF for AI API Endpoints Gratitude Tnanks to buulam for championing the return of iRules contest, this would not have happened without his grit and tenacity. Thanks to our judges: John_Alam Joel_Moses Moe_Jartin Chris_Miller Michael_Waechter dennypayne Kevin_Stewart Austin_Geraci Thanks to Austin_Geraci and WorldTech IT throwing in an additional $5,000 to the grand prize winner! Amazing! Thanks to the contestants for giving up their evening to work on AI infrastructure challenges. Inspiring! Thanks to the F5 leadership team for making events like AppWorld possible. What's Next? Stay tuned for future contests, we are not one and done here. Could be iRules specific...or they could expand to include all programmabilty. Can't wait to see what you're going to build next.
