How to modernize F5 BIG-IP and turn tech debt into readiness

Jim StuckeyAutomation Practice Director | World Wide Technology

Across enterprise IT, modernization is no longer a future initiative. It’s a present-day requirement. For many organizations, especially those running large-scale application delivery environments, the challenge is not deciding whether to modernize, but how to do it quickly, safely, and at scale.

Nowhere is this more evident than in environments built on F5 BIG-IP. Over time, growth, customization, and incremental upgrades have created what I often describe as a “tech debt snowball.” That is, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of legacy infrastructure approaching end of life.

Much of this hardware, including older iSeries and VIPRION platforms, is nearing end-of-support milestones in the coming years. For organizations managing hundreds—or even thousands—of BIG-IP instances, the path forward is clear: modernization is not optional. But executing that modernization is another matter entirely.

From legacy systems to modern infrastructure

Most of the many BIG-IP customers we work with are looking to transition from the brand’s legacy hardware to its modern systems such as F5 rSeries and F5 VELOS, part of F5’s larger Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP). The benefits are well understood: better performance, greater scalability, and a platform that can support evolving application demands.

What’s less straightforward is how to get there.

In large environments, traditional upgrade approaches don’t scale. Manual processes introduce variability, extend timelines, and increase risk. When teams are asked to repeat complex migrations across hundreds of systems, even small inconsistencies can become major issues.

This is where automation changes the equation. By combining F5 ADSP platform capabilities with the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, organizations can shift from one-off migrations to repeatable, orchestrated workflows. Instead of rebuilding environments manually, teams can capture configurations, provision new systems, and validate outcomes in a consistent, controlled way.

The process becomes not only faster, but more predictable and less likely to be upset by user error, both essential requirements at scale.

Turning capability into execution

Technology alone doesn’t solve the problem. The real challenge is operationalizing it.

At World Wide Technology (WWT), a core competency is helping customers bridge that gap. Every environment is different, but the patterns are familiar: large estates, aging infrastructure, and increasing pressure to modernize without disruption.

Our role is to help customers define a path forward and then execute it with confidence. That often starts with validating the approach in a controlled environment. Through our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), we can model customer architectures, test automation workflows, and identify potential issues before anything touches production. From there, we work alongside customers to implement those workflows and scale them across their environments.

In practice, this means taking the combined capabilities of F5 and Red Hat and turning them into something actionable—something that works not just in theory, but in the realities of enterprise infrastructure. We know how to do this because we’ve worked in partnership with F5 and Red Hat for most of the past decade.

A real-world example in financial services

The need for this approach is especially clear in financial services, where scale, regulation, and uptime requirements all converge.

In one recent engagement, we worked with a large multinational financial institution operating across Europe and the United States. Like many organizations in this sector, theclient was running a substantial number of legacy BIG-IP systems and needed to modernize without introducing risk to critical services.

The challenge wasn’t just the number of devices; it was the constraints around them. Strict change-control processes limited when updates could occur, and every step had to be validated to meet regulatory expectations.

We approached the project by combining automated migration workflows with rigorous testing and validation. After an initial discovery phase, we builta lab environment to mirror key aspects of the production infrastructure. From there, we automated the extraction and conversion of existing configurations, provisioned new systems, and layered in pre- and post-migration testing to ensure consistency.

The program ultimately ran for 18 weeks (not sure what this adds.Maybe, say in only 18 weeks we xxx or the program which normally takes 6 months, was completed in 18 weeks), with migrations executed in controlled batches during defined maintenance windows. While the timeline was influenced by change-control requirements, automation allowed the team to move forward methodically and with a high degree of confidence.

That’s a pattern we see often. At this scale, modernization is not just about speed. It’s also about reducing risk and maintaining consistency across every step of the process.

A challenge shared across industries

While financial services organizations tend to be among the most advanced in their use of automation, they are not alone in facing this challenge. Energy providers, federal agencies, and other highly regulated industries are dealing with similar pressures. In many cases, the combination of aging infrastructure and compliance requirements creates a narrow window for modernization.

Healthcare organizations present a different variation of the same problem. Many are operating on older platforms and need to catch up quickly, often with limited resources. In these environments, automation becomes not just an efficiency gain, but a way to accelerate progress without overextending already constrained teams.

Across industries, the underlying issue is the same: large, complex environments that cannot be modernized manually at scale.

Turning urgency into progress

The scale of BIG-IP modernization underway today is significant, but it represents only a portion of the broader technical debt many organizations are working through. What’s changing is not just the urgency, but the approach.

Automation, combined with the right platform and the right execution strategy, allows organizations to move forward with greater speed and confidence. Instead of treating modernization as a series of isolated projects, it becomes a structured, repeatable process.

That shift—from manual effort to automated execution—is what ultimately turns a complex, high-risk challenge into something achievable.

Looking ahead to Red Hat Summit

These ideas will be front and center at Red Hat Summit 2026, taking place this week in Atlanta. F5, Red Hat, and WWT will be showcasing how automation can simplify and accelerate infrastructure modernization, along with demonstrations of automated BIG-IP deployment and integration with platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift.

For organizations facing similar challenges, this provides an opportunity to see how these approaches can be applied in practice.

To learn more about how World Wide Technology’s ATC operates, check out these automation lab reports for F5 BIG-IP and Red Hat Ansible, and for other F5 solutions. For more about the F5-Ansible alliance, visit this page.

Hope to see you at Red Hat Summit.

About the Author

Jim StuckeyAutomation Practice Director | World Wide Technology

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