F5 Agility 2018 Recap

Last month, the Indeni team traveled to the east coast to sponsor the F5 Agility conference hosted in Boston. We got the opportunity to meet countless attendees, many of whom visited our booth and played our onsite slot machine game to win a virtuality reality headsets, including an Oculus Go. In addition to our lively booth, Agility attendees were able to experience over 100 breakout sessions, countless hands-on labs, a 5k a fun-run, and so much more. Here’s a video recap of the event filmed by F5.

For those unable to attend Agility, we collected a selection of the main highlights of the event below:

BIG-IQ 101

BIG-IQ is designed to assist F5 users and application teams to collaborate on managing F5 services and to deploy their apps faster than ever before. BIG-IQ also enables F5 engineers to provide application teams a snapshot without requiring them to give full access to F5 devices. Big-IQ features further include operational management, objectivity level management, and monitoring.

F5aaS Sneak Peak

Agility showcased a sneak peek at their latest endeavor, F5aas. The presentation stated that F5aaS is “a set of enterprise-grade SaaS services for security and application delivery optimized for cloud-native applications and microservices.” The platform includes self-service in the cloud, rapid provisioning of services, and a robust API-based consumption model. F5 mentioned the preview release for DNS/GSLB is slated for Q4 of 2018 with the software becoming available in +6-8 weeks time. The presentation included a demo and images of the user interface. The entire presentation is available here on YouTube.

Trends in App Services & Automation

Lory Mac Vittie gave a presentation examining industry trends and spoke of the introduction of microservices,  impacting the amount of resources companies need to scale. Lory further states that due to the speed required for microservices, it does not make sense putting a piece of hardware for each application. According to  F5’s research, customers want to think about application services in a new way about their deployment, as the number of applications per organization is expected to increase by 50% over the next three years. Due to the increase in scaling Lory states that not only do deployment and networking processes need to change, but that teams need to introduce automation to scale appropriately and meet business goals. Cindy Borovick of F5 gives a recap of the Agility session here.

Ansible & F5

Tim Rupp and Forrest Crenshaw provide a great live demo including debugging of Ansible problems related to F5 products.

The pair focused mainly on the following common issues:

• Running Ansible Module on the BIG-IP instead of the Ansible Controller
• Module External dependencies not installed or up-to-date
• Using Experimental code on a stable install
• Running Ansible in a virtualenv
• Unable to connect to your BIG-IP when using an Ansible playbook
• Misunderstanding the purpose of “Hosts”
• Misunderstanding the expected value of parameters

You can view the full presentation here.

If you’re looking for more information about F5, Indeni, and how the two work together for gold-star load balancing, we have an extensive amount of blogs on F5 specific topics. Additionally,  explore Indeni Crowd, a community of Indeni Experts and knowledgeable members discussing networking issues and breakthroughs to win various rewards.

If you were part of the onsite Indeni survey, don’t forget to review the results!