Streamlining and scaling F5 BIG-IP administration

As IT teams grapple with the demands of operating enterprise applications, administrators responsible for F5 BIG-IP environments must strike a balance between customizability, speed, and scalability. That’s why many admins default to GUI-based workflows, because of the ease of use and flexibility of “click ops.”

For many organizations, BIG-IP isn’t just traffic management—it’s a mission-critical component that ensures the performance, security, and resilience of its most precious resources: applications. As apps grow, deployments diversify across hybrid and multi-cloud environments (a reality for 94% of organizations), and the need for auditability increases.

That means manual, individualized, and click-ops based approaches to BIG-IP administration workflows simply cannot meet the needs of many organizations. Add in considerations like a constantly growing collection of API endpoints that need to be managed, the rise of mobile apps, app-to-app networking, expanding threat landscapes, and more sophisticated attack vectors (and point solutions to mitigate those threats) —and what you’re left with is what we call the operational “ball of fire.”

The question then becomes: how can your team evolve and scale BIG-IP administration effectively to meet the demands of your enterprise initiatives?

The answer is a holistic solution that unifies every aspect of operating applications: the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP). F5 ADSP was designed to address the growing complexity of hybrid multicloud environments, API sprawl, AI-driven workloads, and an expanded attack surface. At its core, F5 ADSP provides a unified solution that integrates delivery, deployment, security, and intelligent operations into a single platform.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the limitations of manual BIG-IP operations, dig into tools and strategies to scale administration workflows as part of F5 ADSP, and illustrate the outcomes you can achieve by adopting advanced BIG-IP administration and automation strategies.

There are several limitations to click-ops workflows. These include:

• Manual overhead: Traditional, manual configuration via the BIG-IP GUI, while extremely powerful and highly customizable, can be time-consuming and error-prone, especially when managing complex, distributed workloads with multiple BIG-IP devices and hundreds of virtual servers in different deployment environments. These risks are compounded if there are no frameworks in place to ensure consistency of configuration across all these instances or automation of common repetitive tasks. In fact, we learned in the 2025 State of Application Strategy Report that 60% of organizations are mired in time-sucking manual operational tasks that block adoption of advanced workflows like AIOps.
• Lack of scalability: As app architectures become more dynamic, traditional administration methods fail to scale. Ensuring global consistency for traffic and security policies across hybrid and multicloud environments becomes overwhelming without centralized, repeatable, automated processes.
• Inconsistent configuration management: Without codified, documented workflows, teams risk diverging configurations, leading to outages, security gaps, and challenges with compliance audits. This can be especially risky for organizations operating in highly regulated industries like finance, healthcare, or government.
• Slow deployments: In the age of CI/CD pipelines, API-first design principles, self-service, templating, and instant app delivery, relying on manual steps to spin up or adjust BIG-IP settings creates organizational bottlenecks and slows the pace of innovation.
• Poor visibility and troubleshooting: Many teams struggle with monitoring automation efforts and tracking BIG-IP changes effectively. Without a reliable audit trail or visibility, troubleshooting and rollback become arduous tasks.

To overcome these challenges and build resilient, future-proof operational workflows, BIG-IP admins are increasingly turning to scalable practices like scripts, automation frameworks, and infrastructure-as-code (IaC), for example. Below, I outline each approach beginning with foundational administration workflows, moving to advanced strategies like GitOps, and finally ending with full automation lifecycle management.

Here’s an overview of how you can start and the value each approach brings:

1. Policy-driven management using built-in BIG-IP tooling. If your team is taking its first steps toward reducing manual overhead, built-in BIG-IP capabilities like Local Traffic Manager (LTM) policies, iRules, iControl REST API, and Application Services 3 Extension (AS3) offer immediate wins. Using these strategies, you can improve administration and management and increase consistency, reliability, and visibility.

By evolving your BIG-IP administration strategy, your organization can reap transformative benefits including:

• Faster deployments: From spinning up new BIG-IP instances in minutes to automating complex policy adjustments, manual delays fade away.
• Operational consistency: Declarative configurations and IaC practices reduce drift, ensuring BIG-IP policies are uniform across your environments.
• Improved security and compliance: GitOps tools enforce version control and auditability, giving you peace of mind in meeting regulatory requirements.
• Greater agility: Scaling BIG-IP workloads in your hybrid or multicloud application environments becomes a predictable, repeatable process. Plus, with automation, templating and service catalogs, more roles can spin up the services they need without involving admins—all while complying with set policies and best practices.
• Staff efficiency and reduced burnout: Automation tools allow teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than being bogged down by repetitive, manual tasks and taking/closing service request tickets.

Adopting scalable BIG-IP administration practices doesn’t require you to jump straight to advanced automation overnight. Instead, it’s about finding the right mix of tools and processes for your team’s current maturity level.

If you’d like to learn more, check out our on-demand webinar, “Scale, Enhance, and Evolve BIG-IP Administration,” where we cover this material in-depth.

Or if you’d like to jump right in, head over to GitHub for tools, guides, code snippets, and real-world examples of these strategies.