F5 Academy Presents

Test Drive Labs

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Join our Summer Series Test Drive Labs for interactive demonstrations and workshops to dive deeper into F5 solutions and learn from our team of experts

We’re excited to invite you to participate in F5’s Summer Series of Test Drive Labs, where innovation meets hands-on learning. Starting this July and running through September, our expert-led sessions will take place most Tuesdays, offering a deep dive into cutting-edge solutions that can help you optimize your infrastructure, modernize your applications, enhance security, and master the growing complexity to AI.

What are Test Drive Labs?

Each lab provides valuable learning opportunities with live demonstrations, hands-on experiences, and expert-led training to empower you at every step of your application delivery and security journey. Whether you’re exploring the power of F5 BIG-IP Next or scaling Kubernetes deployments with NGINX One, there’s something in this series for everyone.

(ISC)2 CPE Credits for Security Sessions

Security-focused F5 Test Drive Lab sessions will qualify for (ISC)2 CPE credits. As an approved (ISC)2 CPE Submitter Partner we will submit for CPE credits on your behalf. (ISC)2 Member ID will be asked during the post-session surveys.

Interested in a Sun, Sand, and Security Set?

Summer’s here, and so is your chance to secure your apps while soaking up the sun! After a lab, book a meeting with your F5 Account Team to explore how we can help safeguard your organization in today’s dynamic AI landscape. As a thank-you, we’ll send you our exclusive Sun, Sand + Security Set—a beach towel, sunscreen, and lip balm trio—perfect for your summer adventures.

sun, sand, and security

Upcoming Sessions

July 08, 2025

10:00 AM PT
AI 101

In this session, we’ll explore how organizations are leveraging AI for internal and external use cases and how F5 solutions can help ensure success. Key topics include:

  • Deciding whether to build your own GPU cluster or use Cloud Native services for AI applications. 
  • Leveraging Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to provide domain-specific, up-to-date knowledge to your AI applications. 
  • Overcoming limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) and interacting with external systems using Model Context Protocol (MCP) agents. 
  • Addressing AI application security concerns. 

We’ll highlight key F5 solutions to support your AI efforts: 

  • AI Gateway for enhanced security and observability. 
  • BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes deployed on NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs to accelerate, scale, and secure networking and security for AI Infrastructure.
  • API Gateway and API Security for consistent and secure integration across your AI application. 
  • Distributed Cloud (XC) for bot protection, DDoS mitigation, WAF, and global anycast presence. 

This educational webinar will include demonstrations but does not feature a hands-on component.

July 15, 2025

10:00 AM PT
F5 BIG-IP Application Study Tool

Unlock the full potential of your F5 BIG-IP environment by using our Application Study Tool! Dive deep into a world of enhanced insights and seamless integration, leveraging modern open-source telemetry tools. Discover how our custom OpenTelemetry Collector, integrated with BIG-IP data receivers, can transform your data into actionable intelligence, stored in a Prometheus timeseries database, and visualized through pre-configured Grafana dashboards. Whether you're managing a single device or an entire fleet, learn to optimize your operations with quick, reliable application insights. Don't miss this opportunity to elevate your infrastructure—register now and take the first step towards a smarter, more efficient network.

July 22, 2025

10:00 AM PT
Web App Scanning & Security

Lab participants will dive right into Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) within F5 Distributed Cloud. Participants will be hands-on, deploying and managing a Web Application Firewall, while gaining experience with F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense and Malicious Users. Participants will also understand the benefits of continual application scanning to ensure security posture.

July 29, 2025

10:00 AM PT
NGINX One

This session will be a feature overview of the NGINX One recent releases and a demo with examples of how automation can onboard and configure NGINX servers. F5 NGINX One provides access to enterprise-grade components to deliver, scale, and secure apps and APIs. This all-in-one package includes enterprise-supported products designed to manage load balancing, reverse proxy, Kubernetes ingress and egress, API gateway, and web app security needs. Additionally, it offers access to the F5 Distributed Cloud and a SaaS-based management console dedicated to NGINX instances.

July 31, 2025

10:00 AM PT
BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes

AI clusters are coming to a data center infrastructure near you. Learn how BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes provides key services for your DevOps and MLOps co-workers, while maintaining the operational standards in your network and security infrastructure.

August 05, 2025

10:00 AM PT
Exploring and Enabling Automation using Red Hat Ansible on the F5 BIG-IP (Basics)

F5 and Red Hat Ansible provide a joint solution that helps you automate today’s multi-modal infrastructures. By cutting deployment times and significantly reducing the number of resources required to manage modern infrastructures, Red Hat Ansible and F5 can help enable a more agile and responsive IT. 

This instructor-led and hands-on session is for effectively demonstrating Ansible’s capabilities using self-paced exercises. In this Advanced F5 BIG-IP and Ansible lab, attendees will learn cutting-edge techniques around Ansible Playbook development relating to automating F5 BIG-IP load balancing deployments. This hands-on workshop focuses on utilizing the BIG-IP Ansible modules with Ansible Playbooks to automate advanced use cases such as certificate management, WAF policy deployment, and pool/node management.

August 12, 2025

10:00 AM PT
Web App Scanning & Security

Lab participants will dive right into Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) within F5 Distributed Cloud. Participants will be hands-on, deploying and managing a Web Application Firewall, while gaining experience with F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense and Malicious Users. Participants will also understand the benefits of continual application scanning to ensure security posture.

August 14, 2025

10:00 AM PT
Modernize Core Infrastructure by Migrating Legacy BIG-IP Configurations to AS3 with Terraform

This lab is designed for those looking to modernize their infrastructure and migrate their legacy BIG-IP configurations to AS3 with Terraform. You will learn how to utilize Terraform imperative resources to set up BIG-IP configurations, employ the Journey Tool to transform your current configuration into AS3 format and execute the deployment of AS3 configurations onto BIG-IP using Terraform. By the end of this lab, you'll have the skills and knowledge to modernize your infrastructure and take advantage of the benefits of AS3.

August 19, 2025

10:00 AM PT

 
F5 BIG-IP Application Study Tool

Unlock the full potential of your F5 BIG-IP environment by using our Application Study Tool! Dive deep into a world of enhanced insights and seamless integration, leveraging modern open-source telemetry tools. Discover how our custom OpenTelemetry Collector, integrated with BIG-IP data receivers, can transform your data into actionable intelligence, stored in a Prometheus timeseries database, and visualized through pre-configured Grafana dashboards. Whether you're managing a single device or an entire fleet, learn to optimize your operations with quick, reliable application insights. Don't miss this opportunity to elevate your infrastructure—register now and take the first step towards a smarter, more efficient network.

September 09, 2025

10:00 AM PT
NGINX One

This session will be a feature overview of the NGINX One recent releases and a demo with examples of how automation can onboard and configure NGINX servers. F5 NGINX One provides access to enterprise-grade components to deliver, scale, and secure apps and APIs. This all-in-one package includes enterprise-supported products designed to manage load balancing, reverse proxy, Kubernetes ingress and egress, API gateway, and web app security needs. Additionally, it offers access to the F5 Distributed Cloud and a SaaS-based management console dedicated to NGINX instances.

September 11, 2025

10:00 AM PT
Exploring and Enabling Automation using Red Hat Ansible on the F5 BIG-IP (Advanced)

F5 and Red Hat Ansible provide a joint solution that helps you automate today’s multi-modal infrastructures. By cutting deployment times and significantly reducing the number of resources required to manage modern infrastructures, Red Hat Ansible and F5 can help enable a more agile and responsive IT.

This lab will cover the following topics:

  • How to automate Day 0 and Day 1 functions on your F5 BIG-IP Virtual Editions and physical appliances, such as iSeries and rSeries.
  • Ensure best practices with Ansible automation and F5.
  • Understand key use cases for automation of the F5 BIG-IP: the simplicity and repeatability of using Red Hat Ansible to automate large-scale F5 BIG-IP deployments. 

September 23, 2025

10:00 AM PT
BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes

AI clusters are coming to a data center infrastructure near you. Learn how BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes provides key services for your DevOps and MLOps co-workers, while maintaining the operational standards in your network and security infrastructure.

September 30, 2025

10:00 AM PT
An Introduction to Open Telemetry with F5 BIG-IP and BIG-IP Next

This interactive lab session will introduce attendees to Open Telemetry (OTel) concepts and their implementation. During this hands-on, technical session, attendees will utilize an F5 Unified Demo Framework (UDF) blueprint and achieve the following learnings and experience based on real-world scenarios:

  • Insight into how applications are instrumented utilizing the Open Telemetry SDK
  • Configuration knowledge of telemetry streaming of logs and metrics from BIG-IP and BIG-IP Next utilizing  an OTel collector

This lab session will include various technologies, including F5 BIG-IP, to provide L4/L7 ADC services and utilize F5 Telemetry Streaming (TS) to stream telemetry data to an OTel collector gateway. We will also use a sample application with a Python frontend application and a Redis backend database. Additionally, we will use Open Telemetry Collector to receive and proxy telemetry from the BIG-IP and sample applications to the observability platforms. Furthermore, Jaeger provides visibility for application tracing, Prometheus for BIG-IP metrics, and Splunk for BIG-IP Next metrics.