Automation: Managing F5 BIG-IP Configurations Using Puppet

Most of us are still learning new ways to optimize continuous deployments and reduce release cycles. In complex environments this often includes automating, streamlining, and eliminating costly, wasteful processes. With proper automation in place, resources in the infrastructure have the ability to elastically expand and contract as necessary. To provide the required software-defined approach for automating the management of infrastructure resources, operations teams are always looking for automation and configuration management tools. Puppet offers technology that can be used to automate and manage your compute, storage and network devices including, the highly programmable F5 BIG-IP solutions.

Some of you might already be familiar with the existing F5-Puppet solution and the F5 module made available to manage the F5 infrastructure. This module was originally developed by the Puppet team and is tied to the Puppet enterprise version. While many customers already use this module for managing BIG-IP configuration objects such as VLANS, Self-IPs, Virtual-servers, Pools, etc., there is of course room to add more features and improve upon it.

With that in mind F5 & Puppet are working together to develop a new F5 module with additional features and initial configurations for NTP, DNS settings, and even high availability. The new module also has advanced LTM features like profile management, iRules, key-cert management etc. It has essentially been developed in-house at F5 as an open-source project. We believe open-sourcing the F5 module will help us release more features while keeping the development cycles short so that our customers can reap the benefits on a quicker cadence.  

F5 will also be at this year’s PuppetConf, taking place Oct. 10–12 in San Francisco, so stop by and chat with F5 & Puppet experts. There will be technology demos at F5's exhibition booth, and a brief presentation from F5's Eric Ji, details below:

Automate BIG-IP Configurations with Puppet
Infrastructure As Code is becoming top of mind as companies transform to cloud based business models to manage today’s complex IT environments. With Puppet’s extensibility via modules and F5 iControl API advantages, F5 and Puppet developed a BIG-IP LTM configuration management solution. Besides deploying initial BIG-IP configurations, the F5 and Puppet joint solution provides the functionality for operations teams to configure high availability and to create and configure BIG-IP objects—including server nodes, pools, virtual servers—that are required for typical application deployment. Come to this session to learn about how Puppet can be used to automate F5 BIG-IP configurations and workflows.

Time:  October, 12 at 1:20 – 1:35 p.m.
Location: Level 2, Continental 1-3

We’re very much looking forward to seeing everyone!

Additional Resources:

• Scenarios to Automate BIG-IP with Puppet – F5 DevCentral article
• Automating Application Deployments with F5 BIG-IP and Puppet – F5 white paper