Happy 20th Birthday, BIG-IP TMOS!
I wasn’t in the waiting room with the F5 family, ears and eyes perked for the release announcement of BIG-IP version 9.0. I was a customer back in 2004, working on a government contract at Scott AFB, Illinois. I shared ownership of the F5 infrastructure, pairs of BIG-IPs running version 4.5 on Dell PowerEdge 2250 servers with one other guy. But maybe a month or two before the official first release of TMOS, my F5 account manager dropped off some shiny new hardware. And it was legit purpose-built and snazzy, not some garage-style hacked Frankenstein of COTS parts like the earlier stuff. And you wonder why we chose Dell servers! Anyway, I was a hard-core network engineer at this time, with very little exposure to anything above layer four, and even there, my understanding was limited to ports and ACLs and maybe a little high-level clarity around transport protocols. But application protocols? Nah. No idea. So with this new hardware and an entirely new full-proxy architecture (what’s a proxy, again?) I was overwhelmed. And honestly, I was frustrated with it for the first few days because I didn’t know what I didn’t know and so I struggled to figure out what to do with it, even to replicate my half-proxy configuration in the “new way”. But I’m a curious person. Given enough time and caffeine, I can usually get to the bottom of a problem, at least well enough to arrive at a workable solution. And so I did. My typical approach to anything is to make it work, make it work better, make it work reliably better, then finally make it work reliably and more performantly better. And the beauty here with this new TMOS system is that I was armed with a treasure trove of new toys. The short list I dug into during my beta trial, which lasted for a couple of weeks: The concept of a profile. When you support a few applications, this is no big deal. When you support hundreds, being able to macro configuration snippets within your application and across applications was revolutionary. Not just for the final solution, but also for setting up and executing your test plans. iRules. Yes, technically they existed in 4.x, but they were very limited in scope. With TMOS, F5 introduced the Tcl-based and F5 extended live-traffic scripting environment that unleashed tremendous power and flexibility for network and application teams. I dabbled with this, and thought I understood exactly how useful this was. More on this a little later. A host operating system. I was a router, switch, and firewall guy. Nothing I worked on had this capability. I mean, a linux system built in to my networking device? YES!!! Two things I never knew I always needed during my trial: 1) tcpdump ON BOX. Seriously--mind blown; and 2) perl scripting against config and snmp. Yeah, I know, I laugh about perl now. But 20 years ago, it was the cats pajamas. A fortunate job change Shortly after my trial was over, I interviewed for an accepted a job offer from a major rental car company that was looking to hire an engineer to redesign their application load balancing infrastructure and select the next gear purchase for the effort. We evaluated Cisco, Nortel/Alteon, Radware, and F5 on my recommendation. With our team’s resident architect we drafted the rubric with which we’d evaluate all the products, and whereas there were some layer two performance issues in some packet sizes that were arguably less than real-world, the BIG-IP blew away the competitors across the board. Particularly, though, in configurability and instrumentation. Tcpdump on box was such a game-changer for us. Did we have issues with TMOS version 9? For sure. My first year with TMOS was also TMOS's first year. Bugs are going to happen with any release, but a brand new thing is guaranteed. But F5 support was awesome, and we worked through all the issues in due time. Anyway, I want to share three wins in my first year with TMOS. Win #1 Our first production rollout was in the internet space, on BIG-IP version 9.0.5. That’s right, a .0 release. TMOS was a brand new baby, and we had great confidence throughout our testing. During our maintenance, once we flipped over the BIG-IPs, our rental transaction monitors all turned red and the scripted rental process had increased by 50%! Not good. “What is this F5 stuff? Send it back!!” But it was new, and we knew we had a gem here. We took packet captures on box, of course, then rolled back and took more packet captures, this time through taps because our old stuff didn’t have tcpdump on box. This is where Jason started to really learn about the implications of both a full proxy architecture and the TCP protocol. It turns our our application servers had a highly-tuned TCP stack on them specific to the characteristics of the rental application. We didn’t know this, of course. But since we implemented a proxy that terminates clients at the BIG-IP and starts a new session to the servers, all those customizations for WAN traffic were lost. Once we built a TCP profile specifically for the rental application servers and tested it under WAN emulation, we not only reached parity with the prior performance but beat it by 10%. Huzzah! Go BIG-IP custom protocol stack configuration! Win #2 For the next internal project, I had to rearchitect the terminal server farm. We had over 700 servers in two datacenters supporting over 60,000 thin clients around the world for rental terminals. Any failures meant paper tickets and unhappy staff and customers. One thing that was problematic with the existing solution is that sometimes clients would detach and upon reconnect would connect directly to the server, which skewed the load balancers view of the world and frequently overloaded some servers to the point all sessions on that server would hang until metrics (but usually angry staff) would notify. Remember my iRules comment earlier on differentiators? Well, iRules architect David Hansen happened to be a community hero and was very helpful to me in the DevCentral forums and really opened my eyes to the art of possible with iRules. He was able to take the RDP session token that was being returned by the client, read it, translate it from its Microsoft encoding format, and then forward the session on to the correct server in the backend so that all sessions continued to be accounted for in our load balancing tier. This was formative for me as a technologist and as a member of the DevCentral community. Win #3 2004-2005 was the era before security patching was as visible a responsibility as it is today, but even then we had a process and concerns when there were obstacles. We had an internal application that had a plugin for the web tier that managed all the sessions to the app tier, and this plugin was no longer supported. We were almost a year behind on system and application patches because we had no replacement for this. Enter, again, iRules. I was able to rebuild the logic of the plugin in an iRule that IIRC wasn’t more than 30 lines. So the benefits ended up not only being a solution to that problem, but the ability to remove that web tier altogether, saving on equipment, power, and complexity costs. And that was just the beginning... TMOS was mature upon arrival, but it got better every year. iControl added REST-based API access; clustered multi-processing introduced tremendous performance gains; TMOS got virtualized, and all the home-lab technologists shouted with joy; a plugin architecture allowed for product modules like ASM and APM; solutions that began as iRules like AFM and SSLO became products. It’s crazy how much innovation has taken place on this platform! The introduction of TMOS didn’t just introduce me to applications and programmability. It did that and I’m grateful, but it did so much more. It unlocked in me that fanboy level that fans of sports teams, video game platforms, Taylor Swift, etc, experience. It helped me build an online community at DevCentral, long before I was an employee. Happy 20th Birthday, TMOS! We celebrate and salute you!Security Automation with F5 BIG-IP and Event Driven Ansible
Updated (September 19th 2023) INTRODUCTION TO EVENT DRIVEN SECURITY: Event Driven Security is one of the projects I have been working on for the last year or so. The idea of creating automated security that can react similarly to how I would react in situations is fascinating to me, and then comes the BIG Question.... "Can I code it?" Originally our solution we had utilized ELK (Elastic Logstash Kibana) where Elasticsearch was my logging and monitoring tool, Kibana was the frontend GUI for helping me visualize and set up my watchers for my webhook triggers, Logstash would be an intermediary to receive my webhooks to help me execute Ansible related code. While using Logstash, if the Ansible code was simple it had no issues, however when things got more complex (i.e., taking payloads from Elastic and feeding them through Logstash to my playbooks), I would sometimes get intermittent results. Some of this could be my lack of knowledge of the software but for me it needed to be simple! As I want to become more complex with my Event Driven Security, I needed a product that would follow those needs. And luckily in October 2022 that product was announced "Event Driven Ansible" it made it so I didn’t need Logstash anymore i could call Ansible related code directly, it even took in webhooks (JSON based) to trigger the code, so I was already half way there! CODE FOR EVENT DRIVEN SECURITY: So now I have setup the preface let’s get down to the good stuff! I have setup a GitHub repository for the code i have been testing with https://github.com/f5devcentral/f5-bd-ansible-eda-demo which is free for all to use and please feel free to take/fork/expand!!! There are some cool things worth noting in the code specifically the transformation of the watch code into something usable in playbooks. This code will take all the times the watcher finds a match in its filter and then then copies the Source IP from that code and puts it into a CSV list, then it sends the list as a variable within the webhook along with the message to execute the code. Here is the code I am mentioning above about transforming and sending the payloads in an elastic watcher. See the Full code in the GitHub repo. (Github Repo --> elastic --> watch_blocked_ips.json) "actions": { "logstash_exec": { "transform": { "script": { "source": """ def hits = ctx.payload.hits.hits; def transform = ''; for (hit in hits) { transform += hit._source.src_ip; transform += ', ' } return transform; """, "lang": "painless" } }, "webhook": { "scheme": "http", "host": "10.1.1.12", "port": 5000, "method": "post", "path": "/endpoint", "params": {}, "headers": {}, "body": """{ "message": "Ansible Please Block Some IPs", "payload": "{{ctx.payload._value}}" }""" } } } } In the Ansible Rulebook the big thing to note is that from the Pre-GA code (which was all CLI ansible-rulebook based) to the GA version (EDA GUI) rulebooks now are setup to call Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) templates. In the code below you can see that its looking for an existing template "Block IPs" in the organization "Default" to be able to run correctly. (Github Repo --> rulebooks --> webhook-block-ips.yaml) --- - name: Listen for events on a webhook hosts: all ## Define our source for events sources: - ansible.eda.webhook: host: 0.0.0.0 port: 5000 ## Define the conditions we are looking for rules: - name: Block IPs condition: event.payload.message == "Ansible Please Block Some IPs" action: run_job_template: name: "Block IPs" organization: "Default" This shows my template setup in Ansible Automation Platform 2.4.x, there is one CRITICAL piece of information i wanted to share about using EDA GA and AAP 2.4 code is that within the template you MUST tick the checkbox on the "Prompt on launch" in the "variables section". This will allow the payload from EDA (given to it from Elastic) to pass on to the playbook. In the Playbook you can see how we extract the payload from the event using the ansible_eda variable, this allows us to pull in the event we were sent from Elastic to Event Driven Ansible and then sent to the Ansible Automation Platform template to narrow down the specific fields we needed (Message and Payload) from there we create an array from that payload so we can pass it along to our F5 code to start adding Blocked IPs to the WAF Policy. (Github Repo --> playbooks --> block-ips.yaml) --- - name: ASM Policy Update with Blocked IPs hosts: lb connection: local gather_facts: false vars: Blocked_IPs_Events: "{{ ansible_eda.event.payload }}" F5_VIP_Name: VS_WEB F5_VIP_Port: "80" F5_Admin_Port: "443" ASM_Policy_Name: "WAF-POLICY" ASM_Policy_Directory: "/tmp/f5/" ASM_Policy_File: "WAF-POLICY.xml" tasks: - name: Setup provider ansible.builtin.set_fact: provider: server: "{{ ansible_host }}" user: "{{ ansible_user }}" password: "{{ ansible_password }}" server_port: "{{ F5_Admin_Port }}" validate_certs: "no" - name: Blocked IP Events From EDA debug: msg: "{{ Blocked_IPs_Events.payload }}" - name: Create Array from BlockedIPs ansible.builtin.set_fact: Blocked_IPs: "{{ Blocked_IPs_Events.payload.split(', ') }}" when: Blocked_IPs_Events is defined - name: Remove Last Object from Array which is empty array object ansible.builtin.set_fact: Blocked_IPs: "{{ Blocked_IPs[:-1] }}" when: Blocked_IPs_Events is defined ... All of this combined, creates a well-oiled setup that looks like the following diagram below, with the code and the flows setup we can now create proactive event based security! Here is the flow of the code that is in the GitHub repo when executed. The F5 BIG-IP is pushing all the monitoring logs to Elastic. Elastic is taking all that data and storing it while utilizing a watcher with its filters and criteria, The Watcher finds something that matches its criteria and sends the webhook with payload to Event Driven Ansible. Event Driven Ansible's Rulebook triggers and calls a template within Ansible Automation Platform and sends along the payload given to it from Elastic. Ansible Automation Platforms Template executes a playbook to secure the F5 BIG-IP using the payload given to it from EDA (originally from Elastic). In the End we go Full Circle, starting from the F5 BIG-IP and ending at the F5 BIG-IP! Full Demonstration Video: Check out our full demonstration video we recently posted (Sept 13th 2023) is available on-demand via https://www.f5.com/company/events/webinars/f5-and-red-hat-3-part-demo-series This page does require a registration and you can check out our 3 part series. The one related to this lab is the "Event-Driven Automation and Security with F5 and Red Hat Ansible" Proactive Securiy with F5 & Event Driven Ansible Video Demo LINKS TO CODE: https://github.com/f5devcentral/f5-bd-ansible-eda-demo2022 DevCentral MVP Announcement
Congratulations to the 2022 DevCentral MVPs! Without users who take time from their busy days to share their experience and knowledge for others, DevCentral would be more of a corporate news site and not an actual user community. To that end, the DevCentral MVP Award is given annually to the outstanding group of individuals – the 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. We understand that 2021 was difficult for everyone, and we are extra-grateful to this year's MVPs for going out of their ways to help others. MVPs get badges in their DevCentral profiles so everyone can see that they are recognized experts. This year’s MVPs will receive a glass award, certificate, exclusive thank-you gifts, and invitations to exclusive webinars and behind-the-scenes looks at things like roadmaps, new product sneak-previews, and innovative concepts in development. The 2022 DevCentral MVPs are: Aditya K Vlogs AlexBCT Amine_Kadimi Austin_Geraci Boneyard Daniel_Wolf Dario_Garrido David.burgoyne Donamato 01 Enes_Afsin_Al FrancisD iaine jaikumar_f5 Jim_Schwartzme1 JoshBecigneul JTLampe Kai Wilke Kees van den Bos Kevin_Davies Lionel Deval (Lidev) LouisK Mayur_Sutare Neeeewbie Niels_van_Sluis Nikoolayy1 P K Patrik_Jonsson Philip Jönsson Rob_Carr Rodolfo_Nützmann Rodrigo_Albuquerque Samstep SanjayP ScottE Sebastian Maniak Stefan_Klotz StephanManthey Tyler.HattonAgility sessions announced
Good news, everyone! This year's virtual Agility will have over 100 sessions for you to choose from, aligned to 3 pillars. There will be Breakouts (pre-recorded 25 minutes, unlimited audience) Discussion Forums (live content up to 45 minutes, interactive for up to 75 attendees) Quick Hits (pre-recorded 10 minutes, unlimited audience) So, what kind of content are we talking about? If you'd like to learn more about how to Simplify Delivery of Legacy Apps, you might be interested in Making Sense of Zero Trust: what’s required today and what we’ll need for the future (Discussion Forum) Are you ready for a service mesh? (breakout) BIG-IP APM + Microsoft Azure Active Directory for stronger cybersecurity defense (Quick Hits) If you'd like to learn more about how to Secure Digital Experiences, you might be interested in The State of Application Strategy 2022: A Sneak Peak (Discussion Forum) Security Stack Change at the Speed of Business (Breakout) Deploy App Protect based WAF Solution to AWS in minutes (Quick Hits) If you'd like to learn more about how to Enable Modern App Delivery at Scale, you might be interested in Proactively Understanding Your Application's Vulnerabilities (Discussion Forum Is That Project Ready for you? Open Source Maturity Models (Breakout) How to balance privacy and security handling DNS over HTTPS (Quick Hits) The DevCentral team will be hosting livestreams, and the DevCentral lounge where we can hang out, connect, and you can interact directly with session presenters and other technical SMEs. Please go to https://agility2022.f5agility.com/sessions.html to see the comprehensive list, and check back with us for more information as we get closer to the conference.Attempting the new path to BIG-IP Certified Administrator
A couple weeks ago I had kjsalchow on for an episode of DevCentral Connects, which you can watch at your pleasure here: I had reached out to Ken and HeidiSchreifels after one our MVPs made a comment on this new path toward certification. I missed the memo (Heidi's article here), but this was big news and I knew we needed to have a conversation with the community. During our chat, Ken mentioned that all five beta tests required to earn your BIG-IP Certified Administrator would be available on-site at AppWorld (as would the recertification test available to ANYONE who has previously held the cert) and that he needed more people to start at #5 and work backwards. And so I did. I had time Tuesday morning before "The Hub" opening party kicked things off, so I knocked out all five beta tests. Here are my thoughts about the experience. I went in completely blind. I did not study, (but the blueprint is here for you) and I did not do the prep work to get my device ready for testing. I did pre-register for tests #3 - #5. When I arrived at the room, the cert team did a great job helping me get the tools set up on my laptop. The test environment downloads a secure browsing session, and there are some known issues with company laptops that lock things down, so you might be best suited to test from a personal laptop. To my knowledge in discussions with them, tablets are not supported. The certiverse delivery was great. Strong improvement from what I recall for the previous versions. Seeing the questions and the diagrams and being able to reference back and forth was far easier to assess the challenges. I always try to use the flagging system for review and that worked great. As this was a beta, I took extra time to provide feedback. For the betas, I had a range of questions from I think 39 to 58 across the five tests and an hour to complete each. For production tests, I believe that will be 30/30. None of them concerned me on time. I really liked the breakdown in the new format. This allows you to progress through the material when studying without having to keep it all upstairs for one test. BIG-IP Administration Install, Initial Configuration, and Upgrade BIG-IP Administration Data Plane Concepts BIG-IP Administration Data Plane Configuration BIG-IP Administration Control Plane Administration BIG-IP Administration Support and Troubleshooting I felt pretty good about the analysis questions, that stuff is pretty cemented in my brain. I work mostly with the BIG-IP APIs now, so I'm less solid on specific tmsh commands or tmui click paths. I put myself in the cone of shame on a few questions because I filmed lightboard lessons for them but I wasn't confident in the right answer. All that said, I have no idea if I passed them, but I think I hit minimally viable candidate on four of them? As they were betas, there were some questions that probably need to be removed, and some questions might need to be refined a little. This is where the always fascinating psychometrics come into play. But for the most part, I though they were a good summary of the knowledge one should have for basic administration. I got the first three tests completed quickly enough to take the other two. Registering for them on-site and jumping into them was painless. The cert team is the bomb-diggity. They're so helpful, friendly, encouraging, and super eager to make everyone successful. It's always a pleasure to cross paths with them! The downside of betas is they are not scored immediately, so I have to wait. Jason does not like waiting... How about you, community? Anyone else take the betas for the refreshed BIG-IP Certified Administrator (or the recertifying exam) and want to share your experience?
DevCentral RSA Trip Planning Guide
Well.. It's RSA season and, for me, this will be SUPER exciting, as it's my first one! The Moscone Center in San Francisco, California, will once again host the RSA Conference on April 24th through April 27th, 2023. There are quite a few things to look forward to this year, but the one that I'm most excited about so far is the theme, "Stronger Together." Through time, we've had a very bi-lateral community in security. Whether it's the Spy vs. Spy influenced White Hat / Black Hat concept from my early days or the Team Red / Blue of today, it feels clear that we need some unity... or better yet, community. At DevCentral, everything's about community, so I'm most curious to see how community is reflected in RSA message. As a community member, though, I'd like to share the things I'm most excited about there. Where to find F5? F5 will be all over the place at this show! Our booth on the expo floor is N5435 and, of course, PSilva will be scheming a Find The Booth Video, I'd imagine! For us DevCentral crew, the booth is like a home base. We frequent it between shoots to check the action and to meet with industry experts. On Tuesday at 8:30am, F5 Labs' Sander_Vinberg will be presenting "The Evolution of CVEs, Vulnerability Management and Hybrid Architectures," with Ben Edwards, from The Cyentia Institute. Knowing Ben a bit, this should be a VERY cool talk and one to highlight if you're into community working together types of themes... oh! You are! Well.. you might see me in the audience snapping pics like Peter Parker. Friday has a couple of sessions you'll want to catch! The first is at 9:30 with Angel Grant, with "Metaspace Race, Securing Minors in the Metaverse - from the Start" and, after lunch, get your CTF on with warburtr0n and Malcolm Heath at "Learn the FUNdamentals of API Security," at 1pm! Keynotes / Speakers: Aside from the F5 presence, I'm very excited to see Tanya Janca, who's got 3 sessions! She's doing a Birds of a Feather on Thursday at 1pm, "Creating a Great DevSecOps Culture," and a lab, "Adding SAST to CI/CD, Without Losing Any Friends," Wednesday at 1:15pm, but the one I'm REALLY thrilled to see is her Keynote on Thursday at 9:40 at the South Stage called, DevSecOps Worst Practices. I'm also looking forward to seeing Alyssa Miller. I just went to see her at Security B-Sides Rochester, NY, but this RSA event is a CISO panel, "CISO Legal Risks and Liabilities," on Wednesday at 1:15 PM, Moscone West 2001. Networking Events: I'm not sure what to expect with these as a new attendee. There are a couple events focused around beer, if that's your thing, and I hear the pub crawl is semi-legendary. The Sandbox looks to offer a wide array of experiences.. also with beer. There is also a Women's Networking Reception, sponsored by Cisco, on Tuesday night at South 303. Personally, I'd like to hit up the "Inclusive Security Welcome & Networking Breakfast" on Wednesday at South, 305. To me, that sounds a bit different and, as someone who's always been passionate about the benefits of workplace diversity it seems like a fit. Also, I think it is only appropriate that I try to attend the "RSAC Loyalty Plus & First-Timer Reception" on Sunday, from 5-7:30, but I think that's up to the airline gods. I Hope To See You There! Like, Comment.. Let us know if you're going, as we'd LOVE to connect with you community members! We want to know what YOU are excited about with RSA this year, as well. If there's anything you're missing out on but would like to see covered, let us know that, as well, so we can try to get coverage for you!Agility 2020 - you're invited!
In-person event for Agility 2020 has been cancelled. Please see the Agility Event Page for more details. (Update 2/28/2020) In an abundance of caution for our customers, partners and employees, we have made the tough decision to cancel our in-person event for Agility 2020 due to the escalating travel and safety concerns related to the global COVID-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak. While we are disappointed to miss sharing ideas and solving problems with customers and partners from around the globe in person, we believe this is the best decision for everyone's welfare. We are rapidly developing an alternative to Agility as a virtual experience in the near term to deliver valuable Lab, Break-out Session, Certification and Keynote content to our customers and partners. Check back regularly for more details on the virtual event or email F5Agility@F5.com for additional information. <Professor Farnsworth imitation> Good news, everybody! </Professor Farnsworth imitation> As you know, there was no Agility 2019. This was in part so that we could reset the time of year for the conference from August to March. Agility 2020 will be held from March 16-19, 2020 at the Swan & Dolphin in Orlando, Florida. Orlando, and Disney, and putt-putt golfing... That's right, *puts on ears* we're going to Disneyworld - and you are all cordially invited to participate in labs and breakouts, meet fellow F5 users, talk with F5 and partner subject-matter experts, learn to develop and deploy applications in days instead of months, secure your apps at scale in a multi-cloud environment, and hear about our vision for the future of F5 and NGINX. Registration is now open! The DevCentral team will be busy as usual that week. We are all flying over, and will be: hosting our usual booth and giving out swag in the expo hall, hosting a walk-in Nerdery zone next to our booth, where folks can drop in to speak with one of our subject-matter experts, presenting breakout sessions, hanging out at Geekfest, connecting community, enjoying the exclusive community area at the final night party, and of course, spoiling the dev/central MVPs during the joint 2019-20 MVP Summit at Agility with special sessions and activities. If you'd like to do more than pick up all the knowledge being dropped, if you have some cool technical stories or lessons-learned to share, please stay tuned for the open call for proposals which should go live in early December - so please start getting those great breakout, lightening round, and open talk ideas ready. Hope to see you there!Enhance your GenAI chatbot with the power of Agentic RAG and F5 platform
Agentic RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) enhances the capabilities of a GenAI chatbot by integrating dynamic knowledge retrieval into its conversational abilities, making it more context-aware and accurate. In this demo, I will demonstrate an autonomous decision-making GenAI chatbot utilizing Agentic RAG. I will explore what Agentic RAG is and why it's crucial in today's AI landscape. I will also discuss how organizations can leverage GPUaaS (GPU as a Service) or AI Factory providers to accelerate their AI strategy. F5 platform provides robust security features that protect sensitive data while ensuring high availability and performance. They optimize the chatbot by streamlining traffic management and reducing latency, ensuring smooth interactions even during high demand. This integration ensures the GenAI chatbot is not only smart but also reliable and secure for enterprise use.Revolutionize F5 BIG-IP Deployment Automation with HashiCorp’s No-Code Ready Terraform Modules
Introduction In organizations today, application infrastructure deployment involves teams such as platform teams, Ops teams, and dev teams all working together to ensure consistency and compliance. This is no easy task as because of siloed teams and expertise and deploying application infrastructure is time-consuming. Platform teams typically address this challenge with automation and by enabling their ops team and developers with self-service infrastructure – which abstracts most steps of deployment. HashiCorp Terraform No-Code Provisioning enables self-service of BIG-IP infrastructure as it allows the platform teams to create and maintain a library of pre-built Terraform modules that can be used by ops teams and developers to deploy multi-cloud BIG-IP infrastructure and services for their applications. This help to ensure consistency and reduce the amount of time organizations need to set up and configure infrastructure. Taking this one step further, the Terraform no-code modules enable infrastructure teams to streamline automation by combining CI/CD pipelines, any custom scripts, and other automation tools in the deployment chain allowing developers and operations teams to deploy F5 application services and infrastructure anywhere with a few clicks from the Terraform Cloud GUI – all while maintaining compliance. What is No-Code? No-code provisioning in Terraform Cloud lets users deploy infrastructure resources without writing Terraform configuration. This lets organizations provide a self-service model to developers with limited infrastructure knowledge and a way to deploy the resources they need. It allows individuals with limited Terraform coding experience or knowledge to provision infrastructure with Terraform. It can accelerate the development process by eliminating the need for coding and testing. It can reduce the reliance on scarce technical resources or expertise. It can improve the flexibility and agility of BIG-IP deployment. How to set up Terraform Cloud for BIG-IP No-Code Module? You need the following: Terraform Cloud account AWS account Terraform Cloud variables set configured with your AWS credentials Fork the example GitHub repository https://github.com/f5businessdevelopment/terraform-aws-bigip-nocode Then, clone your forked repository. Replacing USER with your username. Git clone https://github.com/USER/terraform-aws-bigip-nocode-1 Navigate to the repository directory. Navigate to terraform-aws-bigip-nocode1 directory Make sure you have variables defined as shown below variable "prefix" { description = "provide some prefix for deployment" } variable "region" { description = "AWS region you can define example is us-west-2 " } variable "allow_from" { description = "IP Address/Network to allow traffic from your machine (i.e. 192.0.2.11/32)" } These variable definitions facilitate the exposure of parameters while deploying the BIG-IP instance, you can add/delete any new parameters you need to expose. How to Publish No-code ready module? First, create a tag for your module. Tags are required to create a release on the GitHub repository, Terraform Cloud will use this tag to register the module. git tag 1.0.0 git push –tags Once your release is ready on the Github repository Navigate to Terraform Cloud at https://app.terraform.iohttps://terraform.io Click Registry 🡪 Publish 🡪 Module On the Add Module option select GitHub in Connect to VCS option Browse through your repository and select the repository as shown below. Confirm the selection as shown below Click on Add Module to no-code provision allow list and then hit Publish as shown below. Confirm the selection as shown below Click on Add Module to no-code provision allow list and then hit Publish as shown below. It will take a couple of seconds to Publish the module, once done you will see the screen below as shown. Now you are ready to use the module, to deploy the BIG-IP instance you click on the Provision workspace tab. How to use the BIG-IP No-Code Terraform Module? Once we have the No-Code module published on Terraform Cloud we are ready to use it. Login to Terraform Cloud at https://app.terraform.io and choose an organization Click on Registry 🡪 Module (bigip-1nic-nocode) as shown Click on the Provision workspace button as shown below. Workspaces in Terraform Cloud separate infrastructure configurations to help provide a multi-tenant environment. Provide the 3 parameters below as shown, you can give any name as a prefix, this helps in further providing more multi-tenancy if multiple people are provisioning. Provide workspace name, you can give any name. And finally hit the “Create Workspace” button to deploy the BIG-IP instance. BIG-IP instance will be ready with the Management IP address and password for you. Conclusion: Finally, the Infrastructure team can help to ensure the security and compliance of the infrastructure deployed using the Terraform No-Code Provisioning by implementing security best practices controls and monitoring. Reference Video
How To Build An Agent With n8n And Docker - AI Step-By-Step Lab
OK, community... It’s time for another addition to our AI Step-By-Step Labs, from yours truly! I did a mini lab for installing n8n on a mac. It has been popular, but we thought it would be better as a Docker installation to fit into our lab. So I set out to do this on Docker and it was super easy. I'm not going to spoil it too much, as I'd like for you to visit the GitHub repository for our labs, but this is the flow you create: This lab walks you through installation in Docker and walks you through creation of an AI agent that proxies requests to the LLM instance you created with our first lab on installing Ollama. Please check out the repository on GitHub to get started using this powerful agentic framework in your lab, production or personal use today. Feel free to watch the video on our YouTube channel here:
