WWT CSA Wins F5's Codeshare Challenge Contest
Consulting Solutions Architect Mark Wall won F5's Codeshare Challenge contest for automating F5 setup with Ansible.
On July 15, 2016 F5 posted:
Leading into June's Programmability Month, we announced a codeshare challenge contest, where DevCentral community members could contribute a solution (or several) that they've created to solve problems in their environments. We had a lot of great contributions to the codeshare throughout the contest, and it's always hard to narrow down something as nebulous as "best." That said, we looked for originality, creativity, best practices coding and documentation, as well as breadth of audience for a particular solution. Please join us in congratulating our winners.
iControl Category Prize - Automate F5 Setup with Ansible
Mark Wall contributed this mighty fine entry in the iControl category. Ansible is a simple but powerful workflow tool that combines orchestration with config management and deployment. In this contribution, Mark uses Ansible to deploy a (virtualized) pair of BIG-IPs by defining from a spreadsheet of comma-separated values. Currently, this includes NTP, DNS, hostname, LACP, dot1q, interfaces, vlans, and self-IPs. But it doesn't stop there! It also configures device trust and config sync as well. If you think about the normal user interaction with the GUI to take these steps, that's quite a time savings and elimination of human error (in as much as the spreadsheet data is correct.)