Contacting F5 Support
Contacting F5 for support can sometimes feel like an overwhelming and daunting task if you're not prepared. Opening your case with accurate diagnostics, and a detailed description of your issues will help us route your case to the appropriate technicians, but where do you start? We'll help you prepare for your first or tenth call to support and ensure it's an easy process. Bookmark this page and stop worrying about what you'll need. Clear focus and a calm head during a critical issue is your best advantage. What You'll Need When Contacting Support There are several key pieces of information support will ask for regardless of what module you're opening a ticket on. It's best to have most or all of the data ready in case support asks. In our experience being over prepared is never a bad thing. Submit a QKView to iHealth - iHealth is supports quickest window into your system health, configuration, and any update requirements. This is the first and most important thing to have when opening a case with F5. Additional Log Files - The QKView provides up to 5MB of logs but often grabbing additional logs may include more information. MD5 checksums for all uploaded files - Generating MD5 Checksums ensures F5 support engineers can validate your log, tcpdumps, and qkviews. tcpdump Often if you're having issues with one or more virtual servers, a tcpdump will expedite understanding traffic flow. This can be something you do before contacting support and we at DevCentral always find it to be valuable information. In fact we spend our evenings capturing traffic for fun. Explicit Details of your issue! - Having detailed information on your failure cannot be stressed enough. You should know the overall status of the system when it failed, the traffic flow, and symptoms when contacting support. This will expedite your case to the appropriate engineer. Problem vagueness will delay your resolution. Severity Level - F5 provides categories for you to determine your issue severity.. Sev 1: Site Down - All network traffic has ceased; critical impact to business. Sev 2: Site At Risk - Primary unit failed; no redundant state. Site/System at risk of going down. Sev 3: Performance Degraded - Network traffic is partially functional causing some applications to be unreachable. Sev 4: General Assistance - This is for questions regarding configurations. This should be your default severity for troubleshooting non-critical issues or general questions about product functionality. There are several ways to contact support, and we've found success by opening a web case for all issues, even when calling in for support. This allows you to get files to F5 engineers quicker and expedite your case routing process prior to calling in. F5 Websupport - The websupport interface allows you to create and update cases quickly without having to call support. You will need to register|anchor your F5 Support account for websupport and it's best to do that BEFORE you have an issue. The web support ticket process will require your serial number or parent system ID. Phone - Standard, Premium, and Premium Plus support plans can call F5 for assistance. Have your serial number or parent system ID ready. Chat - Currently available for AWS hourly billed customers (BYOL uses standard support). See our AWS wiki for more information. Azure customers are currently BYOL only (bring your own license) and can purchases regular support plans. Gathering Logs The default QKView will gather 5MB of recent log activity but support may ask for additional logs to help diagnose your issue. Log into the BIG-IP CLI Create a tar archive called logfiles.tar.gz in /var/tmp directory containing all of the files in /var/log by typing the following command: tar -czpf /var/tmp/logfiles.tar.gz /var/log/* Create an MD5 Checksum of the file so support can validate the file Generating MD5 Checksums MD5 checksum files give support a method to validate your upload is free of problems. It's best to use the md5sum command directly on the BIG-IP to reduce potential issues by transferring the file off host prior to running MD5 tools. To create an md5sum: Log into the BIG-IP CLI Use the previously created logfiles.tar.gz from the above as example: md5sum /var/tmp/logfiles.tar.gz > /var/tmp/logfiles.tar.gz.md5 Use the CAT command to validate the contents of the md5 file: cat /var/tmp/logfiles.tar.gz.md5 You should see a result similar to: 1ebe43a0b0c7800256bfe94cdd079311 /var/tmp/logfiles.tar.gzIntroduction to BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator
Demo Video What is SSL Orchestrator? F5 BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator is designed and purpose-built to enhance SSL/TLS infrastructure, provide security solutions with visibility into SSL/TLS encrypted traffic, and optimize and maximize your existing security investments. BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator delivers dynamic service chaining and policy-based traffic steering, applying context-based intelligence to encrypted traffic handling to allow you to intelligently manage the flow of encrypted traffic across your entire security stack, ensuring optimal availability. Designed to easily integrate with existing architectures and to centrally manage the SSL/TLS decrypt/re-encrypt function, BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator delivers the latest SSL/ TLS encryption technologies across your entire security infrastructure. With BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator’s high-performance encryption and decryption capabilities, your organization can quickly discover hidden threats and prevent attacks at multiple stages, leveraging your existing security solutions. BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator ensures encrypted traffic can be decrypted, inspected by security controls, then re-encrypted—delivering enhanced visibility to mitigate threats traversing the network. As a result, you can maximize your security services investment for malware, data loss prevention (DLP), ransomware, and NGFWs, thereby preventing inbound and outbound threats, including exploitation, callback, and data exfiltration. Why is this important? Offload your SSL decryption compute resources to F5. Let F5 handle all the decrypt/encrypt functions so your security tools don’t have to. This will increase the performance capabilities of your existing security solutions. Easily create policy to bypass decryption of sensitive traffic like Banking, Finance and Healthcare related websites. Improve high availability by leveraging SSL Orchestrator to distribute load among a group of security devices, like Next Generation Firewalls. A comprehensive SSL decryption solution gives you much-needed visibility into encrypted traffic, which enables you to block encrypted threats. SSL Orchestrator integrates with your existing infrastructure An SSL Orchestrator “Service” is defined as a device that SSL Orchestrator passes decrypted traffic to. A Service can be Layer 2 or 3. It can be unidirectional (TAP). It can be an ICAP server. It can be an Explicit or Transparent HTTP proxy. A Layer 2 device (bridging/bump-in-wire) refers to connectivity without IP Address configuration. Layer 2 devices pass all traffic from one interface to another interface. A Layer 3 device (typical NAT) refers to IP Address to IP Address connectivity. Layer 3 devices must be specifically configured to work on a network. An Explicit Proxy device also utilizes IP Address to IP Address connectivity. However, in this case, web applications have to be specifically configured to use an Explicit Proxy. A Transparent Proxy device also utilizes IP Address to IP Address connectivity. In this case, web applications DO NOT need to be configured to use a Proxy. Other type of devices are supported, like an ICAP server or TAP device. An ICAP server is often used for Data Loss Prevention (DLP). A TAP device is often used for passive visibility as it receives an exact copy of decrypted traffic. Service Chains Service Chains are user-defined groupings of one or more Services. Multiple Service Chains are supported by Policy (see next section). There are no restrictions on the type of Services that can be in a Service Chain. For example: a Service Chain can consist of one or more Layer 2 devices, and one or more Layer 3 devices, and so on. Policy SSL Orchestrator supports a flexible policy editor that is used to determines what type of traffic to send or not to send to a Service Chain. For example: in the case of an Outbound (see next section) configuration, certain content can bypass SSL Decryption based on URL Categories like Banking, Finance and Healthcare. Topologies A Topology defines how SSL Orchestrator will be interested into your traffic flow. It is defined as either Incoming or Outgoing. High-level parameters for how/what to intercept are defined here. In an Inbound Topology, traffic comes from users on the internet to access an application like mobile banking or shopping. This may also be referred to as a reverse proxy. In an Outbound Topology, traffic comes from users on your network to access sites/applications on the internet. For example: a person who works at Apple HQ who is accessing the internet using the company’s network. This may also be referred to as a forward proxy. Conclusion F5 BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator simplifies and accelerates the deployment of SSL visibility and orchestration services. Whether for modern, custom, or classic apps, and regardless of their location—be it on premises, in the cloud, or at the edge—BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator is built to handle today’s dynamic app landscape. Related Articles Integrating Security Solutions with F5 BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator
Introduction to DevCentral Basics
Starting out as a new user to F5 technology can be a daunting task; where do you start? The DevCentral Basics program is DevCentral’s way to ease your transition from new user to administrator without filling your day with deployment guides or step-by-step how-to articles. If you’re new to F5 and BIG-IP, this is the place to start. We scoured the internet search engines to find out what you're asking so we can answer those questions first and provide you a comfortable platform for continuing education. To get you started, we'll start with some basic documentation for you, the new F5 admin: What Is BIG-IP? To regular users this question doesn't make sense but it's a very good question for those new to F5. Here we cover exactly what is F5's BIG-IP and how the ecosystem works together. What is Load Balancing? If you want to balance your application traffic load across a bunch of physical servers and make those servers look like one great big server to the outside world, this article will get you started in the right direction. What are Application Delivery Controllers? Part 1 & Part 2 ADCs are what all good load balancers grew up to be. They can help with application scalability, high availability, and predictability if your website. We give you some of the basic terminology and functionality of these application lifelines. Your First 30 Days With BIG-IP You've received one or more boxes in your office. Or maybe you received a license for a VE. Now what? Let's check out what you can do with your license and walking through the interface so you know where everything is. This is an overview what to expect as a new admin of F5 and take some of the intimidation factor away when you login to the management console for that very first time. Contacting F5 Support We'll cover your basic support questions and what to do when there's a problem so you can get in contact with the correct resources as quick as possible. From using DevCentral and AskF5 to using iHealth, we'll show you where your best support resources are. Troubleshooting BIG-IP - The Basics Divide and conquer is your best method to find out why you're receiving server resets or having a tough time understanding why you keep bouncing between web servers. Reducing your complexity and starting with traffic basics allows you to step through issues and get you up and running. What is DNS? Imagine how difficult it would be to use the Internet if you had to remember dozens of number combinations to do anything. Learn how the Internet’s phonebook, DNS, translates the domain names you type into a browser into an IP address so you can find the resource you're looking for on the Internet. Once you're comfortable with BIG-IP you can move on and branch into learning all of our various products that comprise the BIG-IP architecture. As we update and build new features for BIG-IP, we'll create new DevCentral Basics content and link to further reading so you don't have to learn BIG-IP through deployment guides. We'll give you the why, deployment guides will tell you how.What is an Application Delivery Controller - Part I
A Little History Application Delivery got its start in the form of network-based load balancing hardware. It is the essential foundation on which Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) operate. The second iteration of purpose-built load balancing (following application-based proprietary systems) materialized in the form of network-based appliances. These are the true founding fathers of today's ADCs. Because these devices were application-neutral and resided outside of the application servers themselves, they could load balance using straightforward network techniques. In essence, these devices would present a "virtual server" address to the outside world, and when users attempted to connect, they would forward the connection to the most appropriate real server doing bi-directional network address translation (NAT). Figure 1: Network-based load balancing appliances. With the advent of virtualization and cloud computing, the third iteration of ADCs arrived as software delivered virtual editions intended to run on hypervisors. Virtual editions of application delivery services have the same breadth of features as those that run on purpose-built hardware and remove much of the complexity from moving application services between virtual, cloud, and hybrid environments. They allow organizations to quickly and easily spin-up application services in private or public cloud environments. Basic Application Delivery Terminology It would certainly help if everyone used the same lexicon; unfortunately, every vendor of load balancing devices (and, in turn, ADCs) seems to use different terminology. With a little explanation, however, the confusion surrounding this issue can easily be alleviated. Node, Host, Member, and Server Most ADCs have the concept of a node, host, member, or server; some have all four, but they mean different things. There are two basic concepts that they all try to express. One concept—usually called a node or server—is the idea of the physical or virtual server itself that will receive traffic from the ADC. This is synonymous with the IP address of the physical server and, in the absence of a ADC, would be the IP address that the server name (for example, www.example.com) would resolve to. We will refer to this concept as the host. The second concept is a member (sometimes, unfortunately, also called a node by some manufacturers). A member is usually a little more defined than a server/node in that it includes the TCP port of the actual application that will be receiving traffic. For instance, a server named www.example.com may resolve to an address of 172.16.1.10, which represents the server/node, and may have an application (a web server) running on TCP port 80, making the member address 172.16.1.10:80. Simply put, the member includes the definition of the application port as well as the IP address of the physical server. We will refer to this as the service. Why all the complication? Because the distinction between a physical server and the application services running on it allows the ADC to individually interact with the applications rather than the underlying hardware or hypervisor. A host (172.16.1.10) may have more than one service available (HTTP, FTP, DNS, and so on). By defining each application uniquely (172.16.1.10:80, 172.16.1.10:21, and 172.16.1.10:53), the ADC can apply unique load balancing and health monitoring based on the services instead of the host. However, there are still times when being able to interact with the host (like low-level health monitoring or when taking a server offline for maintenance) is extremely convenient. Most load balancing-based technology uses some concept to represent the host, or physical server, and another to represent the services available on it— in this case, simply host and services. Pool, Cluster, and Farm Load balancing allows organizations to distribute inbound application traffic across multiple back-end destinations, including cloud deployments. It is therefore a necessity to have the concept of a collection of back-end destinations. Pools, as we will refer to them (also known as clusters or farms) are collections of similar services available on any number of hosts. For instance, all services that offer the company web page would be collected into a pool called "company web page" and all services that offer e-commerce services would be collected into a pool called "e-commerce." The key element here is that all systems have a collective object that refers to "all similar services" and makes it easier to work with them as a single unit. This collective object—a pool—is almost always made up of services, not hosts. Virtual Server Although not always the case, today the term virtual server means a server hosting virtual machines. It is important to note that like the definition of services, virtual server usually includes the application port was well as the IP address. The term "virtual service" would be more in keeping with the IP:Port convention; but because most vendors, ADC and Cloud alike use virtual server, this article uses virtual server as well. Putting It All Together Putting all of these concepts together makes up the basic steps in load balancing. The ADC presents virtual servers to the outside world. Each virtual server points to a pool of services that reside on one or more physical hosts. Figure 2: Application Delivery comprises four basic concepts—virtual servers, pool/cluster, services, and hosts. While the diagram above may not be representative of a real-world deployment, it does provide the elemental structure for continuing a discussion about application delivery basics. ps Next Steps Read What is Load Balancing? if you haven't already and check out What is an Application Delivery Controller - Part II.What is iCall?
tl;dr - iCall is BIG-IP’s event-based granular automation system that enables comprehensive control over configuration and other system settings and objects. The main programmability points of entrance for BIG-IP are the data plane, the control plane, and the management plane. My bare bones description of the three: Data Plane - Client/server traffic on the wire and flowing through devices Control Plane - Tactical control of local system resources Management Plane - Strategic control of distributed system resources You might think iControl (our SOAP and REST API interface) fits the description of both the control and management planes, and whereas you’d be technically correct, iControl is better utilized as an external service in management or orchestration tools. The beauty of iCall is that it’s not an API at all—it’s lightweight, it’s built-in via tmsh, and it integrates seamlessly with the data plane where necessary (via iStats.) It is what we like to call control plane scripting. Do you remember relations and set theory from your early pre-algebra days? I thought so! Let me break it down in a helpful way: P = {(data plane, iRules), (control plane, iCall), (management plane, iControl)} iCall allows you to react dynamically to an event at a system level in real time. It can be as simple as generating a qkview in the event of a failover or executing a tcpdump on a server with too many failed logins. One use case I’ve considered from an operations perspective is in the event of a core dump to have iCall generate a qkview, take checksums of the qkview and the dump file, upload the qkview and generate a support case via the iHealth API, upload the core dumps to support via ftp with the case ID generated from iHealth, then notify the ops team with all the appropriate details. If I had a solution like that back in my customer days, it would have saved me 45 minutes easy each time this happened! iCall Components Three are three components to iCall: events, handlers, and scripts. Events An event is really what drives the primary reason to use iCall over iControl. A local system event (whether it’s a failover, excessive interface or application errors, too many failed logins) would ordinarily just be logged or from a system perspective, ignored altogether. But with iCall, events can be configured to force an action. At a high level, an event is "the message," some named object that has context (key value pairs), scope (pool, virtual, etc), origin (daemon, iRules), and a timestamp. Events occur when specific, configurable, pre-defined conditions are met. Example (placed in /config/user_alert.conf) alert local-http-10-2-80-1-80-DOWN "Pool /Common/my_pool member /Common/10.2.80.1:80 monitor status down" { exec command="tmsh generate sys icall event tcpdump context { { name ip value 10.2.80.1 } { name port value 80 } { name vlan value internal } { name count value 20 } }" } Handlers Within the iCall system, there are three types of handlers: triggered, periodic, and perpetual. Triggered A triggered handler is used to listen for and react to an event. Example (goes with the event example from above:) sys icall handler triggered tcpdump { script tcpdump subscriptions { tcpdump { event-name tcpdump } } } Periodic A periodic handler is used to react to an interval timer. Example: sys icall handler periodic poolcheck { first-occurrence 2017-07-14:11:00:00 interval 60 script poolcheck } Perpetual A perpetual handler is used under the control of a deamon. Example: handler perpetual core_restart_watch sys icall handler perpetual core_restart_watch { script core_restart_watch } Scripts And finally, we have the script! This is simply a tmsh script moved under the /sys icall area of the configuration that will “do stuff" in response to the handlers. Example (continuing the tcpdump event and triggered handler from above:) modify script tcpdump { app-service none definition { set date [clock format [clock seconds] -format "%Y%m%d%H%M%S"] foreach var { ip port count vlan } { set $var $EVENT::context($var) } exec tcpdump -ni $vlan -s0 -w /var/tmp/${ip}_${port}-${date}.pcap -c $count host $ip and port $port } description none events none } Resources iCall Codeshare Lightboard Lessons on iCall Threshold violation article highlighting periodic handlerWhat is HTTP?
tl;dr - The Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, is the predominant tool in the transferring of resources on the web, and a "must-know" for many application delivery concepts utilized on BIG-IP HTTP defines the structure of messages between web components such as browser or command line clients, servers like Apache or Nginx, and proxies like the BIG-IP. As most of our customers manage, optimize, and secure at least some HTTP traffic on their BIG-IP devices, it’s important to understand the protocol. This introductory article is the first of eleven parts on the HTTP protocol and how BIG-IP supports it. The series will take the following shape: What is HTTP? (this article) HTTP Series Part II - Underlying Protocols HTTP Series Part III - Terminology HTTP Series Part IV - Clients, Proxies, & Servers — Oh My! HTTP Series Part V - Profile Basic Settings HTTP Series Part VI - Profile Enforcement HTTP Series Part VII - Oneconnect HTTP Series Part VIII - Compression & Caching HTTP Series Part IX - Policies & iRules HTTP Series Part X - HTTP/2 A Little History Before the World Wide Web of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) was pioneered, the internet was alive and well with bulletin boards, ftp, and gopher, among other applications. In fact, by the early 1990’s, ftp accounted for more than 50% of the internet traffic! But with the advent of HTML and HTTP, it only took a few years for the World Wide Web to completely rework the makeup of the internet. By the late 1990’s, more than 75% of the internet traffic belonged to the web. What makes up the web? Well get ready for a little acronym salad. There are three semantic components of the web: URIs, HTML, and HTTP. The URI is the Uniform Resource Identifier. Think of the URI as a pointer. The URI is a simple string and consists of three parts: the protocol, the server, and the resource. Consider https://devcentral.f5.com/s/articles/ . The protocol is https, the server is devcentral.f5.com, and the resources is /articles/. URL, which stands for Uniform Resource Locator, is actually a form of a URI, but for the most part they can be used interchangeably. I will clarify the difference in the terminology article. HTML is short for the HyperText Markup Language. It’s based on the more generic SGML, or Standard Generic Markup Language. HTML allows content creators to provide structure, text, pictures, and links to documents. In our context, this is the HTTP payload that BIG-IP might inspect, block, update, etc. HTTP as declared earlier, is the most common way of transferring resources on the web. It’s core functionality is a request/response relationship where messages are exchanged. An example of a GET message in the HTTP/1.1 version is shown in the image below. This is eye candy for now as we’ll dig in to the underlying protocols and HTTP terminology shown here in the following two articles. But take notice of the components we talked about earlier defined there. The protocol is identified as HTTP. Following the method is our resource /home, and the server is identified in the Host header. Also take note of all those silly carriage returns and new lines. Oh, the CRLF!! If you’ve dealt with monitors, you can feel our collective pain! HTTP Version History Whereas HTTP/2 has been done for more than two years now, current usage is growing but less than 20%, with HTTP/1.1 laboring along as the dominant player. We’ll cover version-specific nuances later in this series, but the major releases throughout the history of the web are: HTTP/0.9 - 1990 HTTP/1.0 - 1996 HTTP/1.1 - 1999 HTTP/2 - 2015 Given the advancements in technology in the last 18 years, the longevity of HTTP/1.1 is a testament to that committee (or an indictment on the HTTP/2 committee, you decide!) Needless-to-say, due to the longevity of HTTP/1.1, most of the industry expertise exists here. We’ll wrap this series with HTTP/2, but up front, know that it’s a pretty major departure from HTTP/1.1, most notably is that it is a binary protocol, whereas earlier versions of HTTP were all textual.What is Load Balancing?
tl;dr - Load Balancing is the process of distributing data across disparate services to provide redundancy, reliability, and improve performance. The entire intent of load balancing is to create a system that virtualizes the "service" from the physical servers that actually run that service. A more basic definition is to balance the load across a bunch of physical servers and make those servers look like one great big server to the outside world. There are many reasons to do this, but the primary drivers can be summarized as "scalability," "high availability," and "predictability." Scalability is the capability of dynamically, or easily, adapting to increased load without impacting existing performance. Service virtualization presented an interesting opportunity for scalability; if the service, or the point of user contact, was separated from the actual servers, scaling of the application would simply mean adding more servers or cloud resources which would not be visible to the end user. High Availability (HA) is the capability of a site to remain available and accessible even during the failure of one or more systems. Service virtualization also presented an opportunity for HA; if the point of user contact was separated from the actual servers, the failure of an individual server would not render the entire application unavailable. Predictability is a little less clear as it represents pieces of HA as well as some lessons learned along the way. However, predictability can best be described as the capability of having confidence and control in how the services are being delivered and when they are being delivered in regards to availability, performance, and so on. A Little Background Back in the early days of the commercial Internet, many would-be dot-com millionaires discovered a serious problem in their plans. Mainframes didn't have web server software (not until the AS/400e, anyway) and even if they did, they couldn't afford them on their start-up budgets. What they could afford was standard, off-the-shelf server hardware from one of the ubiquitous PC manufacturers. The problem for most of them? There was no way that a single PC-based server was ever going to handle the amount of traffic their idea would generate and if it went down, they were offline and out of business. Fortunately, some of those folks actually had plans to make their millions by solving that particular problem; thus was born the load balancing market. In the Beginning, There Was DNS Before there were any commercially available, purpose-built load balancing devices, there were many attempts to utilize existing technology to achieve the goals of scalability and HA. The most prevalent, and still used, technology was DNS round-robin. Domain name system (DNS) is the service that translates human-readable names (www.example.com) into machine recognized IP addresses. DNS also provided a way in which each request for name resolution could be answered with multiple IP addresses in different order. Figure 1: Basic DNS response for redundancy The first time a user requested resolution for www.example.com, the DNS server would hand back multiple addresses (one for each server that hosted the application) in order, say 1, 2, and 3. The next time, the DNS server would give back the same addresses, but this time as 2, 3, and 1. This solution was simple and provided the basic characteristics of what customer were looking for by distributing users sequentially across multiple physical machines using the name as the virtualization point. From a scalability standpoint, this solution worked remarkable well; probably the reason why derivatives of this method are still in use today particularly in regards to global load balancing or the distribution of load to different service points around the world. As the service needed to grow, all the business owner needed to do was add a new server, include its IP address in the DNS records, and voila, increased capacity. One note, however, is that DNS responses do have a maximum length that is typically allowed, so there is a potential to outgrow or scale beyond this solution. This solution did little to improve HA. First off, DNS has no capability of knowing if the servers listed are actually working or not, so if a server became unavailable and a user tried to access it before the DNS administrators knew of the failure and removed it from the DNS list, they might get an IP address for a server that didn't work. Proprietary Load Balancing in Software One of the first purpose-built solutions to the load balancing problem was the development of load balancing capabilities built directly into the application software or the operating system (OS) of the application server. While there were as many different implementations as there were companies who developed them, most of the solutions revolved around basic network trickery. For example, one such solution had all of the servers in a cluster listen to a "cluster IP" in addition to their own physical IP address. Figure 2: Proprietary cluster IP load balancing When the user attempted to connect to the service, they connected to the cluster IP instead of to the physical IP of the server. Whichever server in the cluster responded to the connection request first would redirect them to a physical IP address (either their own or another system in the cluster) and the service session would start. One of the key benefits of this solution is that the application developers could use a variety of information to determine which physical IP address the client should connect to. For instance, they could have each server in the cluster maintain a count of how many sessions each clustered member was already servicing and have any new requests directed to the least utilized server. Initially, the scalability of this solution was readily apparent. All you had to do was build a new server, add it to the cluster, and you grew the capacity of your application. Over time, however, the scalability of application-based load balancing came into question. Because the clustered members needed to stay in constant contact with each other concerning who the next connection should go to, the network traffic between the clustered members increased exponentially with each new server added to the cluster. The scalability was great as long as you didn't need to exceed a small number of servers. HA was dramatically increased with these solutions. However, since each iteration of intelligence-enabling HA characteristics had a corresponding server and network utilization impact, this also limited scalability. The other negative HA impact was in the realm of reliability. Network-Based Load balancing Hardware The second iteration of purpose-built load balancing came about as network-based appliances. These are the true founding fathers of today's Application Delivery Controllers. Because these boxes were application-neutral and resided outside of the application servers themselves, they could achieve their load balancing using much more straight-forward network techniques. In essence, these devices would present a virtual server address to the outside world and when users attempted to connect, it would forward the connection on the most appropriate real server doing bi-directional network address translation (NAT). Figure 3: Load balancing with network-based hardware The load balancer could control exactly which server received which connection and employed "health monitors" of increasing complexity to ensure that the application server (a real, physical server) was responding as needed; if not, it would automatically stop sending traffic to that server until it produced the desired response (indicating that the server was functioning properly). Although the health monitors were rarely as comprehensive as the ones built by the application developers themselves, the network-based hardware approach could provide at least basic load balancing services to nearly every application in a uniform, consistent manner—finally creating a truly virtualized service entry point unique to the application servers serving it. Scalability with this solution was only limited by the throughput of the load balancing equipment and the networks attached to it. It was not uncommon for organization replacing software-based load balancing with a hardware-based solution to see a dramatic drop in the utilization of their servers. HA was also dramatically reinforced with a hardware-based solution. Predictability was a core component added by the network-based load balancing hardware since it was much easier to predict where a new connection would be directed and much easier to manipulate. The advent of the network-based load balancer ushered in a whole new era in the architecture of applications. HA discussions that once revolved around "uptime" quickly became arguments about the meaning of "available" (if a user has to wait 30 seconds for a response, is it available? What about one minute?). This is the basis from which Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) originated. The ADC Simply put, ADCs are what all good load balancers grew up to be. While most ADC conversations rarely mention load balancing, without the capabilities of the network-based hardware load balancer, they would be unable to affect application delivery at all. Today, we talk about security, availability, and performance, but the underlying load balancing technology is critical to the execution of all. Next Steps Ready to plunge into the next level of Load Balancing? Take a peek at these resources: Go Beyond POLB (Plain Old Load Balancing) The Cloud-Ready ADC BIG-IP Virtual Edition Products, The Virtual ADCs Your Application Delivery Network Has Been Missing Cloud Balancing: The Evolution of Global Server Load BalancingWhat Is BIG-IP?
tl;dr - BIG-IP is a collection of hardware platforms and software solutions providing services focused on security, reliability, and performance. F5's BIG-IP is a family of products covering software and hardware designed around application availability, access control, and security solutions. That's right, the BIG-IP name is interchangeable between F5's software and hardware application delivery controller and security products. This is different from BIG-IQ, a suite of management and orchestration tools, and F5 Silverline, F5's SaaS platform. When people refer to BIG-IP this can mean a single software module in BIG-IP's software family or it could mean a hardware chassis sitting in your datacenter. This can sometimes cause a lot of confusion when people say they have question about "BIG-IP" but we'll break it down here to reduce the confusion. BIG-IP Software BIG-IP software products are licensed modules that run on top of F5's Traffic Management Operation System® (TMOS). This custom operating system is an event driven operating system designed specifically to inspect network and application traffic and make real-time decisions based on the configurations you provide. The BIG-IP software can run on hardware or can run in virtualized environments. Virtualized systems provide BIG-IP software functionality where hardware implementations are unavailable, including public clouds and various managed infrastructures where rack space is a critical commodity. BIG-IP Primary Software Modules BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) - Central to F5's full traffic proxy functionality, LTM provides the platform for creating virtual servers, performance, service, protocol, authentication, and security profiles to define and shape your application traffic. Most other modules in the BIG-IP family use LTM as a foundation for enhanced services. BIG-IP DNS - Formerly Global Traffic Manager, BIG-IP DNS provides similar security and load balancing features that LTM offers but at a global/multi-site scale. BIG-IP DNS offers services to distribute and secure DNS traffic advertising your application namespaces. BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) - Provides federation, SSO, application access policies, and secure web tunneling. Allow granular access to your various applications, virtualized desktop environments, or just go full VPN tunnel. Secure Web Gateway Services (SWG) - Paired with APM, SWG enables access policy control for internet usage. You can allow, block, verify and log traffic with APM's access policies allowing flexibility around your acceptable internet and public web application use. You know.... contractors and interns shouldn't use Facebook but you're not going to be responsible why the CFO can't access their cat pics. BIG-IP Application Security Manager (ASM) - This is F5's web application firewall (WAF) solution. Traditional firewalls and layer 3 protection don't understand the complexities of many web applications. ASM allows you to tailor acceptable and expected application behavior on a per application basis . Zero day, DoS, and click fraud all rely on traditional security device's inability to protect unique application needs; ASM fills the gap between traditional firewall and tailored granular application protection. BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) - AFM is designed to reduce the hardware and extra hops required when ADC's are paired with traditional firewalls. Operating at L3/L4, AFM helps protect traffic destined for your data center. Paired with ASM, you can implement protection services at L3 - L7 for a full ADC and Security solution in one box or virtual environment. BIG-IP Hardware BIG-IP hardware offers several types of purpose-built custom solutions, all designed in-house by our fantastic engineers; no white boxes here. BIG-IP hardware is offered via series releases, each offering improvements for performance and features determined by customer requirements. These may include increased port capacity, traffic throughput, CPU performance, FPGA feature functionality for hardware-based scalability, and virtualization capabilities. There are two primary variations of BIG-IP hardware, single chassis design, or VIPRION modular designs. Each offer unique advantages for internal and collocated infrastructures. Updates in processor architecture, FPGA, and interface performance gains are common so we recommend referring to F5's hardware page for more information.What is BIG-IQ?
tl;dr - BIG-IQ centralizes management, licensing, monitoring, and analytics for your dispersed BIG-IP infrastructure. If you have more than a few F5 BIG-IP's within your organization, managing devices as separate entities will become an administrative bottleneck and slow application deployments. Deploying cloud applications, you're potentially managing thousands of systems and having to deal with traditionally monolithic administrative functions is a simple no-go. Enter BIG-IQ. BIG-IQ enables administrators to centrally manage BIG-IP infrastructure across the IT landscape. BIG-IQ discovers, tracks, manages, and monitors physical and virtual BIG-IP devices - in the cloud, on premise, or co-located at your preferred datacenter. BIG-IQ is a stand alone product available from F5 partners, or available through the AWS Marketplace. BIG-IQ consolidates common management requirements including but not limited to: Device discovery and monitoring: You can discovery, track, and monitor BIG-IP devices - including key metrics including CPU/memory, disk usage, and availability status Centralized Software Upgrades: Centrally manage BIG-IP upgrades (TMOS v10.20 and up) by uploading the release images to BIG-IQ and orchestrating the process for managed BIG-IPs. License Management: Manage BIG-IP virtual edition licenses, granting and revoking as you spin up/down resources. You can create license pools for applications or tenants for provisioning. BIG-IP Configuration Backup/Restore: Use BIG-IQ as a central repository of BIG-IP config files through ad-hoc or scheduled processes. Archive config to long term storage via automated SFTP/SCP. BIG-IP Device Cluster Support: Monitor high availability statuses and BIG-IP Device clusters. Integration to F5 iHealth Support Features: Upload and read detailed health reports of your BIG-IP's under management. Change Management: Evaluate, stage, and deploy configuration changes to BIG-IP. Create snapshots and config restore points and audit historical changes so you know who to blame. 😉 Certificate Management: Deploy, renew, or change SSL certs. Alerts allow you to plan ahead before certificates expire. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): BIG-IQ controls access to it's managed services with role-based access controls (RBAC). You can create granular controls to create view, edit, and deploy provisioned services. Prebuilt roles within BIG-IQ easily allow multiple IT disciplines access to the areas of expertise they need without over provisioning permissions. Fig. 1 BIG-IQ 5.2 - Device Health Management BIG-IQ centralizes statistics and analytics visibility, extending BIG-IP's AVR engine. BIG-IQ collects and aggregates statistics from BIG-IP devices, locally and in the cloud. View metrics such as transactions per second, client latency, response throughput. You can create RBAC roles so security teams have private access to view DDoS attack mitigations, firewall rules triggered, or WebSafe and MobileSafe management dashboards. The reporting extends across all modules BIG-IQ manages, drastically easing the pane-of-glass view we all appreciate from management applications. For further reading on BIG-IQ please check out the following links: BIG-IQ Centralized Management @ F5.com Getting Started with BIG-IQ @ F5 University DevCentral BIG-IQ BIG-IQ @ Amazon MarketplaceWhat is the Edge?
Where oh where to begin? "The Edge" excitement today is reminiscent of "The Cloud" of many moons ago. Everyone, I mean EVERYONE, had a "to the cloud" product to advertise. CS Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia) wrote an essay titled "The Death of Words" where he bemoaned the decay of words that transitioned from precise meanings to something far more vague. One example he used was gentleman, which had a clear objective meaning (a male above the station of yeoman whose family possessed a coat of arms) but had decayed (and is to this day) to a subjective state of referring to someone well-mannered. This is the case with industry shifts like cloud and edge, and totally works to the advantage of marketing/advertising. The result, however, is usually confusion. In this article, I'll briefly break down the edge in layman's terms, then link out to the additional reading you should do to familiarize yourself with the edge, why it's hot, and how F5 can help with your plans. What is edge computing? The edge, plainly, is all about distribution, taking services once available only in private datacenters and public clouds and shifting them out closer to where the requests are, whether those requests are coming from humans or machines. This shift of services is comprehensive, so while technologies from the infancy of the edge like CDNs are still in play, the new frontier of compute, security, apps, storage, etc, enhances the user experience and broadens the scope of real-time possibilities. CDNs were all about distributing content. The modern edge is all about application and data distribution. Where is the edge, though? But, you say, how is that not the cloud? Good question. Edge computing builds on the technology developed in the cloud era, where de-centralized compute and storage architectures were honed. But the clouds are still regional datacenters. A good example to bring clarity might be an industrial farm. Historically, data from these locations would be sent to a centralized datacenter or cloud for processing, and depending on the workloads, tractors or combines might be idle (or worse: errant) while waiting for feedback. With edge computing, a local node (consider this an enterprise edge) would be gathering all that data, processing, analyzing, and responding in real-time to the equipment, and then sending up to the datacenter/cloud anything relevant for further processing or reporting. Another example would be self-driving car or gaming technology, where perhaps the heavy compute for these is at the telco edge instead of having to backhaul all of it to a centralized processing hub. Where is the edge? Here, there, and everywhere. The edge, conceptually, can be at any point in between the user (be it human, animal, or machine) and the datacenter/cloud. Physically, though, understand that just like "serverless" applications still have to run on an actual server somewhere, edge technology isn't magic, it has to be hosted somewhere as well. The point is that host knows no borders; it can be in a provider, a telco, an enterprise, or even in your own home (see Lori's "Find My Cat" use case). The edge is coming for you The stats I've seen from Gartner and others are pretty shocking. 76% already have plans to deploy at the edge, and 75% of data will be processed at the edge by 2025? I'm no math major, but that sounds like one plus two, carry the three, uh, tomorrow! Are you ready for this? The good news is we are here to help. The best leaps forward in anything in our industry have always come from efforts bringing simplicity to the complexities. Abstraction is the key. Think of the progression of computer languages and how languages like C abstract the needs in Assembler, or how dynamically typed languages like python even abstract away the need for types. Or how hypervisors abstract lower level resources and allow you to carve out compute. Whether you're a netops persona thankful for tools that abstract BGP configurations from the differing syntax of various routers, or a developer thankful for libraries that abstract the nuances of different DNS providers so you can generate your SSL certificates with Let's Encrypt, all of that is abstraction. I like to know what's been abstracted. That's practical at times, but not often. Maybe in academia. Frankly, the cost associated to knowing "all the things" ins't one for which most orgs will pay. Volterra delivers that abstraction, to the compute stack and the infrastructure connective tissue, in spades, thus removing the tenuous manual stitching required to connect and secure your edge services. General Edge Resources Extending Adaptive Applications to the Edge Edge 2.0 Manifesto: Redefining Edge Computing Living on the Edge: How we got here Increasing Diversity of Location and Users is Driving Business to the Edge Application Edge Integration: A Study in Evolution The role of cloud in edge-native applications Edge Design & Data | The Edgevana Podcast (Youtube) Volterra Specific Resources Volterra and Power of the Distributed Cloud (Youtube) Multi-Cloud Networking with Volterra (Youtube) Network Edge App: Self-Service Demo (Youtube) Volterra.io Videos
