DevCentral'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!Certified 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 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 LinkedInDevCentral'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 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 ICYMI - September 2024
DevCentral publishes new content constantly, and it’s easy to miss the latest from F5’s technical user community with all that turnover. So here’s a monthly round-up of DevCentral news, content, and events—in case you missed it! New and Notable Share Your Expertise at F5 AppWorld 2025! CFP is now open. F5 and NetApp partnership for Large Language Model AI deployments - F5 and NetApp have teamed up to improve enterprise AI capabilities by using F5’s secure multicloud networking solutions with NetApp’s data management tools. Experience the power of F5 NGINX One with feature demos - Introducing F5 NGINX One, a powerful solution designed to significantly enhance business operations with its high-performance data plane and user-friendly SaaS-based console, offering robust traffic management and critical monitoring features. Content Round-Up AI/LLM F5 BIG-IP and NetApp StorageGRID - Providing Fast and Scalable S3 API for AI apps - F5 BIG-IP's advanced load balancing improves HTTPS server performance. It ensures high availability and optimal storage node utilization when used with NetApp's StorageGRID S3 compatible object storage. How to Prepare Your Network Infrastructure to Add HPC Clusters for AI to Your Data Center - HPC AI cluster integration in enterprise data centers brings challenges, such as network segmentation, security, and high costs. Learn how to overcome these challenges. F5 Distributed Cloud: How I Did it - Migrating Applications to Nutanix NC2 with F5 Distributed Cloud Secure Multicloud Networking - Enterprises struggle to scale and migrate applications while maintaining consistent security and user experience. F5 Distributed Cloud Services (XC) simplifies extending and migrating applications from on-premises environments to Nutanix NC2 clusters, backed by Nutanix's comprehensive hyper-converged infrastructure. Security Insights What is Web Cache Exploitation? - Explore insights from a recent BlackHat/DefCon 2024 presentation on Web Cache Exploitation, which reveals how discrepancies in HTTP server and proxy behaviors can lead to vulnerabilities like Web Cache Poisoning and Web Cache Deception. (HTTP) Redirection via Arbitrary Host Header - In this article, we delve into the importance of the Host header in web requests, its role in enabling multiple-domain hosting, and the potential security risks associated with improper handling. How to Identify and Manage Scrapers (Pt. 1) and How to Identify and Manage Scrapers (Pt. 2) - Here are different ways to find and manage web scraping activities. This includes: scrapers that identify themselves, identifying using IP address, more advanced techniques for finding scrapers that don't identify themselves. We will also talk about the challenges caused by pretending to be someone else and the increase in scraping done by AI. Exploring the Zero Trust Models of AWS, Microsoft, and Google - In response to distributed workforces and advanced cyber threats, the Zero Trust Model enforces strict identity verification, granular access control, and continuous monitoring for users, devices, and resources. Major cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft, and Google have their own versions. Scanning for CVE-2017-9841 Drops Precipitously - The July 2024 Sensor Intelligence Series reports a significant drop in scanning activities for vulnerabilities CVE-2017-9841 and CVE-2023-1389, despite their previous high levels. This highlights the importance of ongoing cybersecurity vigilance. Scuba Gear from CISA, ROBLOX Malware Campaign, and RUST backdoo-rs This Week in Security Leaks & breaches, memory-safe C++, cryptominers and bridging the air-gap This Week in Security GC Document AI Transitive Access Abuse, make-me-root holes in VMWare fixed and more - This Week in Security BIG-IP Next: How to secure egress with F5 Service Proxy for Kubernetes (Japanese language version: 次世代のBIG-IP SPKとK8s コンテナの外部アクセス制御) - Securing Kubernetes egress traffic can be challenging. F5's Service Proxy for Kubernetes (SPK) offers a solution. It dynamically manages egress through its Calico egress gateway. This allows for central control, consistent network policies, and source NAT translation. BIG-IP Next Installation Guides - These resources will walk you through the initial steps of getting Central Manager and instances installed on the various platforms for labs and production. F5 Distributed Cloud: How I Did it - Migrating Applications to Nutanix NC2 with F5 Distributed Cloud Secure Multicloud Networking -Enterprises face challenges with scaling and migrating applications. F5 Distributed Cloud Services (XC) helps by enabling seamless application extension and migration, as shown with Nutanix NC2 clusters. Architecture Options for Kubernetes Service Discovery in Distributed Cloud - F5 Distributed Cloud (XC) Virtual Edition Customer Edge increases service discovery in Kubernetes clusters, allowing easy connectivity in dynamic microservices environments. Cascading Configs Tool for F5 Distributed Cloud Managed Service Provider (MSP) and Delegated Access Customers - The new XC-Cascading-Configs tool simplifies configuration management for F5 Distributed Cloud customers. It allows efficient push and maintenance of shared configurations across multiple tenants. NGINX: Deploying F5 NGINX Plus Graviton-powered Containers as AWS ECS Fargate Tasks - Amazon's Graviton4 chip offers great price-performance for cloud architects. NGINX Plus works with ARM64, ECS, and ECS Fargate. It's easy to set up, use, and scale within AWS. Announcing F5 NGINX Gateway Fabric 1.4.0 with IPv6 and TLS Passthrough - NGINX Gateway Fabric 1.4.0 features IPv6 support, TLS passthrough, server zone metrics, custom pod annotations, and improved testing automation. It ensures stability and performance for Kubernetes clusters. BIG-IP: F5 BIG-IP deployment with Red Hat OpenShift - keeping client IP addresses and egress flows - OpenShift 4.14's AdminPolicyBasedExternalRoute improves control of egress traffic by utilizing F5 BIG-IP as the default gateway for certain namespaces. This feature ensures client IP preservation and integrates security functions. BIG-IP VE in Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization - Running BIG-IP VE in Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization connects virtual machines and Kubernetes. This simplifies management and operations by using OpenShift's KubeVirt and QEMU+KVM Linux virtualization layers. VMware to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Migration - Seamlessly migrate workloads and BIG-IP Virtual Editions from VMware to OpenShift Virtualization. Our comprehensive guide will streamline your transition and unify your application infrastructure. F5 Cloud Failover Extension (CFE), private endpoints, and custom DNS - Using the F5 Cloud Failover Extension (CFE) for API-based failover in public cloud environments can cause issues with API calls being blocked. This is due to custom DNS settings and private endpoints. To resolve this, configure DNS settings to properly resolve private IP addresses.Remember your first stack?
Do you remember your first stack? Maybe you got lucky and had a chance to build your first stack from the ground up, with ample time and resources. Your stack was flexible, efficient, and modern, with everything you need, and nothing you don’t. Maybe you inherited a stack that was built when your company’s business was really different…and managing security and updates takes enough time and resources that you never quite got around to upgrading the system to meet current business needs. Maybe your first stack showed just how many people had been involved in its development over the years, with idiosyncratic workarounds to allow integration of older and more modern tech. As you’ve moved from role to role, you’ve probablynoticed that every stack is different, featuring a unique combination of elements that reflect the current and historical needs of the business…and a unique set of app and API security and delivery needs to match. At F5, we’ve noticed that, too - That’s whywe’ve worked hard to build a set of security and delivery solutions that can work on any architecture. That’s also why we created the Frankenstacks—these colorful stacks are meant to bring to life the unique architectures our customers have built and to represent the creative solutions those architectures include. So, go ahead Choose a new Frankenstack avatar. (You can even pick one that reps your real-life stack.) Tell us what you remember about your first stack. And remember that whatever you’ve built, we secure that.'Monitoring for Everyone' Next Time on DevCentral Connects
It's early, a storms rolling in and you just want to stay in bed. I get it. But who's keeping an eye on your systems when you want to smash that snooze button for the third time? Monitoring! That's who! If done right, monitoring can catch the unexpected, but also help predict the expected. Join us Tuesday, March 14th, 8:30AM Pacific as buulamwelcomes Ryan McLean. He's a Developer Advocate with Datadog and he'll tell us all about, ‘LET’S USE RED’ so that monitoring can benefit everyone. This linksets your reminder that DevCentral Connects is live every Tuesday, 8:30AM Pacific. It's not that bad out. Get up and subscribe. And, while you're at it, join the DevCentral Connects Group!DevCentral 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!
