Getting Started with iControl: Interface Taxonomy & Language Libraries
In part two of this article in the Getting Started with iControl series, we will cover the taxonomy for both the SOAP and REST iControl interfaces, that were discussed in theprevious article on iControl History, as well as introduce the language libraries we unofficially support on DevCentral. Note: This article published by Jason Rahm but co-authored with Joe Pruitt. Taxonomy The two interfaces were designed in different ways and with different goals. iControl SOAP was developed as a functional API behaving very similar to a Java or C++ class where you have interfaces and methods included within those interfaces. Interfaces roughly related to product features and for organization, those interfaces were then grouped into larger namespaces, or product modules. To get a little more specific, iControl SOAP implements a RPC (Remote Procedure Call) type model. To make use of the APIs, one just instantiated an instance of the interface and then used functional (create(), get_list(), ...) and accessor (get_*(), set_*(), ...) methods with it. iControl REST on the other hand, is based on a document model where documents are passed back and forth containing all the relevant information of the given object(s) in question. This interface makes use of the HTTP protocol's VERBs (GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE) for action and URIs (ie. /mgmt/tm/ltm/pool) for the objects you are manipulating. Instead using methods to perform actions, you use the associated HTTP VERB to trigger the action, the URI to denote the object, and the POST data or Query Parameters to indicated the objects details. iControl REST is currently modeled off of the tmsh shell which uses similar modules and interfaces from SOAP (with different abbreviations) in it's URI path. Module Interface Method iControl SOAP LocalLB Pool get_list() create() add_member() Networking SelfIP get_netmask() set_vlan() Module Sub-Module Component iControl REST ltm pool <pool name> net self <self name> Now for some simple examples using the SOAP and REST interfaces using python libraries. Don't worry if python's not your thing,we’ll cover some perl, powershell, java, and Node.jsas well in the following articles in this series. ### ignore SSL cert warnings >>> import ssl >>> ssl._create_default_https_context = ssl._create_unverified_context ### SOAP >>> import bigsuds >>> b_soap = bigsuds.BIGIP('172.16.44.15', 'admin', 'admin') >>> b_soap.LocalLB.Pool.get_list() ['/Common/myNewPool2'] ### REST >>> from f5.bigip import BigIP as f5 >>> b_rest = f5('172.16.44.15', 'admin', 'admin') >>> b_rest.ltm.pools.get_collection()[0].name u'myNewPool2' Note there really isn't much difference between the two iControl interfaces when it comes to the client code. This is the beauty of libraries, they mask the hard work! We'll dig into the code more in the next article. so don't worry too much about the code above just yet. Interfaces & Objects In the above section, we briefly outlined the high level taxonomy between module and interface. There are literally thousands of defined methods for the SOAP interface, all defined and published in theiControl wikion DevCentral. For the REST interface, you will want toreference the iControl REST wikias well, but you will really want to become intimate with thetmsh reference guide, as a solid understanding of how tmsh works will make a more favorable going. Language Libraries Raw SOAP payload is out of the question unless you enjoy pain, so a library is a given if using the SOAP interface. But even with REST, as easy as it is to interact with interface directly, the fact is if you aren’t using a library, you still have to create all your JSON documents and investigate and prepare all the payload requirements when manipulating or creating objects. When selecting SOAP or REST, the reality is if you’re going to build applications that utilize iControl, you’re definitely going to want to use a library. What is a Library? Depending on the language or languages you might use, a library can be called many things, such as a package, a wrapper, a module, a class, etc. But at it’s most basic meaning, a library is simply a collection of tools and/or functionality that abstracts some of the work required in understanding the underlying protocols and assists in getting things done faster. For example, if you are formatting an office document and changing the font size, color, family, and bolding it on select words throughout the doc, it could be painful to do this if you have to do it more than a few times. You could record a macro of these steps, and then for each subsequent task, replay that work via the macro so you only have to do it once. In a roundabout way, this is what libraries do for you as well. The common repetitive work is done for you, so you can focus on the business logic in your applications. What Libraries Are Available? There are several libraries available, some languages having more than one to support both iControl SOAP and iControl REST, and at least one (like python) that has several libraries for just the SOAP interface. To each his own, we like to expand the horizons around here and equip everyone for whatever language suits best for your needs and abilities. We could list out all the libraries here, but they are already documented on theprogrammability page in the wiki, at least the ones we are directly responsible for. Joe does a lot with PowerShell and Perl, and I with python, and we do have quite a few community members well versed in the .Net languages and python too, though there is some support for java and ruby as well. On Github I've seen aniControl wrapper for the Go language, and I seem to recall some love for PHP a while back. Now that we'rethrough the historyand some foundational information on the SOAP and REST interfaces, we can move on to actually building something! In the next article in this series, we'll jump into some code samples to highlight the pros and cons of working with SOAP and REST, as well as show you the differences among a few languages for each interface in accomplishing the same tasks.Getting Started with iControl: History
tl;dr - iControl provides access to BIG-IP management plane services through SOAP and REST API interfaces. The Early Days iControl started back in early 2000. F5 had 2 main products: BIG-IP and 3-DNS (later GTM, now BIG-IP DNS). BIG-IP managed the local datacenter's traffic, while 3-DNS was the DNS orchestrator for all the BIG-IP's in numerous data centers. The two products needed a way to communicate with each other to ensure they were making the right traffic management decisions respective to all of the products in the system. At the time, the development team was focused on developing the fastest running code possible and that idea found it's way into the cross product communication feature that was developed. The technology the team chose to use was the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) as standardized by the Object Management Group (OMG). Coming hot off the heels of F5's first management product SEE-IT (which was another one of my babies), the dev team coined this internal feature as "LINK-IT" since it "linked" the two products together. With the development of our management, monitoring, and visualization product SEE-IT, we needed a way to get the data off of the BIG-IP. SEE-IT was written for Windows Server and we really didn't want to go down the route of integrating into the CORBA interface due to several factors. So, we wrote a custom XML provider on BIG-IP and 3-DNS to allow for configuration and statistic data to be retrieved and consumed by SEE-IT. It was becoming clear to me that automation and customization of our products would be beneficial to our customers who had been previously relying on our SNMP offerings. We now had 2 interfaces for managing and monitoring our devices: one purely internal (LINK-IT) and the other partially (XML provider). The XML provider was very specific to our SEE-IT products use case and we didn't see a benefit of trying to morph that so we looked back at LINK-IT to see what we could to do make that a publicly supported interface. We began work on documenting and packaging it into F5's first public SDK. About that time, a new standard was emerging for exchanging structured information. The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), which allows for structured information exchange, was being developed but not fully ratified until version 1.2 in 2003. I had to choose to roll our own XML implementation or make use of this new proposed specification. There was risk as the specification was not a standard yet but I made the choice to go the SOAP route as I felt that picking a standard format would give us the best 3rd party software compatibility down the road. Our CORBA interface was built on a nice class model which I used as a basis for an SOAP/XML wrapper on top of that code. I even had a great code name for the interface: X-LINK-IT! For those who were around when I gave my "XML at F5" presentation to F5 Product Development, you may remember the snide comments going around afterwards about how XML was not a great technology and a big mistake supporting. Good thing I didn't listen to them... At this point in mid-2001, the LINK-IT SDK was ready to go and development of X-LINK-IT was well underway. Well, let's just say that Marketing didn't agree with our ingenious product naming and jumped in to VETO our internal code names for our public release. I'll give our Chief Marketer Jeff Pancottine credit for coining the term "iControl" which was explained to me as "Internet Control". This was the start of F5's whole Internet Controlled Architecture messaging by the way. So, LINK-IT and X-LINK-IT were dead and iControl CORBA and iControl SOAP were born. The Death of CORBA, All Hail SOAP The first version of the iControl SDK for CORBA was released on 5/25/2001 with the SOAP version trailing it by a few months. This was around the BIG-IP version 3 time frame. We chugged along for a few years through the BIG-IP version 4 life and then a big event occurred that was the demise for CORBA - well, it's actually 2 events. The first event was the full rewrite of the BIG-IP data plane when TMOS was introduced in BIG-IP, version 9 (we skipped from version 4 to version 9 for some reason that slips my mind). Since virtually the entire product was rewritten, the interfaces that were tied to the product features, would have to change drastically. We used this as an opportunity to look at the next evolution of iControl. Until this point, iControl SOAP was just a shim on top of CORBA and it had some performance issues so we worked at splitting them apart and having SOAP talk directly to our configuration engine. Now we had 2 interface stacks side by side. The second event was learning we only had 1 confirmed customer using the CORBA interface compared to the 100's using SOAP. Given that knowledge and now that BIG-IP and 3-DNS no longer used iControl CORBA to talk to each other, the decision was made to End of Life iControl CORBA with Version 9.0. But, iControl SOAP still used the CORBA IDL files for it's API definitions and documentation so fun trivia note: the same CORBA tools are still in place in today's iControl SOAP build tools that were there in version 3 of BIG-IP. I'm fairly sure that is the longest running component in our build system. The Birth of DevCentral I can't speak about iControl without mentioning DevCentral. We had our iControl SDK out but no where to directly support the developers using it. At that time, F5 was a "hardware" company and product support wasn't ready to support application developers. Not many know that DevCentral was created due to the popularity of iControl with our customer base and was born on a PC under my desk in 2003. I continued to help with DevCentral part time for a few years but in 2007 I decided to work full time on building our community and focusing 100% on DevCentral. It was about this time that we were pushing the idea of merging the application and infrastructure teams together - or at least getting them to talk more frequently. This was a precursor to the whole DevOps mentality so I'd like to think we were a bit ahead of the curve on that. Enter iControl REST In 2013, iControl was reaching it's teenage years and starting to show it's age a bit. While SOAP is still supported by all the major tool vendors, application development was shifting to richer browser-based apps. And with that, Representational State Transfer (REST) was gaining steam. REST defined a usage pattern for using browser based mechanisms with HTTP to access objects across the network with a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format for the content. To keep up with current technologies, the PD team at F5 developed the first REST/JSON interface in BIG-IP version 11.5 as Early Access and was made Generally Available in version 11.6. With the REST interface, more modern web paradigms could be supported and you could actually code to iControl directly from a browser! There were also additional interface based tools for developing and debugging built directly into the service to give service listings and schema definitions. At the time of this writing, F5 supports both of the main iControl interfaces (SOAP and REST) but are focusing all new energy on our REST platform for the future. For those who have developed SOAP integrations, have no fear as that interface is not going away. It will just likely not get all the new feature support that will be added into the REST interfaces over time. SDKs, Toolkits, and Libraries Through the years, I've developed several client libraries (.Net, PowerShell, Java) for iControl SOAP to assist with ramp-up time for initial development. There have also been numerous other language based libraries for languages like Ruby, PHP, and Python developed by the community and other development teams. Most recently, F5 has published the iControl library for Python which is available as part of our OpenStack integration. DevCentral is your place to for our API documentation where we update our wiki with API changes on each major release. And as time rolls on, we are adding REST support for new and existing products such as iWorkflow, BIG-IQ, and other products yet to be released that will include SDKs and other reference material. F5 has a strong commitment to our end users and their automation and integration projects with F5 technologies. Coming full circle, my current role is overseeing APIs and SDKs for standards, consistency, and completeness in our Programmability and Orchestration (P&O) team so keep a look out for future articles from me on our efforts on that front. And REST assured, we will continue to do all we can to help our customers move to new architectures and deployment models with programmability and automation with F5 technologies.
