Configuring F5

Configuring F5 devices to deliver large enterprise applications is not trivial. You have to set up nodes, monitors, and profiles, deploy virtual IP addresses, and more. It’s all very complex, but configuration management makes it easier.

Puppet Enterprise lets you automate both configuration and management of your F5 load balancers with the same language you use to manage compute infrastructure. Now you can eliminate those time-consuming handoffs between system and networking teams and speed application delivery.

As the speed of business increases every year, this friction reduction becomes more and more critical. Read more about using Puppet for this on our network device integration page.

Manage Infrastructure as Code for Load-Balanced Applications

Puppet Enterprise gives you centralized management of your entire infrastructure. You define your infrastructure as code once, with a simple, human-readable language, and manage all your resources — compute, networking, and storage — with a single management interface. Now all your technical teams can collaborate easily, and you can deliver applications faster.

Streamline Migration to the Cloud

Ease the complexity of migrating your applications to the cloud. Puppet Enterprise lets you define the desired configuration of your F5 BIG-IP devices once, and then deploy again and again, both on prem and in the cloud. Your deployments are not only repeatable, they’re consistent across your hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Apply DevOps Practices to Application Deployment

Automating the configuration and deployment of your applications with code lets your team adopt DevOps practices. You define your infrastructure as code, and that code can be reviewed, tested and approved before being deployed. By applying agile development best practices to your infrastructure code, you get faster and more reliable deployments.

Deploy Infrastructure Along With the Application Itself

Rather than requiring your development teams to request network infrastructure to support the applications they're deploying, allow them to provision the needed infrastructure right alongside the applications it supports, using the same configuration language they're used to.

For example, to create an F5 server pool that points to existing nodes, one could declare the pool right in Puppet code. It's then immediately available for a virtual server to use once deployed.

f5_pool { '/Common/puppet_pool':
    ensure                    => 'present',
    members                   => [
        { name => '/Common/WWW_Server_1', port => '80', },
        { name => '/Common/WWW_Server_2', port => '80', },
    ],
    availability_requirement  => 'all',
    health_monitors           => ['/Common/http_head_f5'],
    require                   => [
        F5_node['/Common/WWW_Server_1'],
        F5_node['/Common/WWW_Server_2'],
    ],
}

 

Learn More About F5 in the Forge