Automating BIG-IP with Ansible

This course introduces network administrators, operators, and DevOps engineers to the foundational and F5-specific technologies required to automate BIG-IP. Participants will gain exposure to multiple technologies for a variety of use cases and will have hands-on experience that leave them better prepared to automate the onboarding and configuration of BIG-IP.

Course Objectives

• Review Automation and DevOps concepts
• Describe the components of iControl REST calls and how they interact with BIG-IP
• Stand up and configure BIG-IP applications using iControl REST
• Describe the major components of Ansible and how they work together to configure BIG-IP
• Use flow control elements such as conditionals and looping in Ansible Playbooks
• Onboard and configure BIG-IP applications using Ansible

Course Topics

• Review the Linux Command Line
• Review BIG-IP Application Creation
• Discuss Automation and DevOps Concepts
• Configuring BIG-IP with iControl REST
• Configuring BIG-IP programmatically with Ansible

Audience

This course is intended for network administrators and operators and DevOps engineers interested in automating tasks on BIG-IP systems in their public and private Clouds as well as in their datacenter infrastructure.

Prerequisites

Students should be familiar with and be able to configure basic BIG-IP elements such as:

• Virtual Servers
• Pools, Pool Members and Nodes
• Pool Monitors
• Basic Virtual Server Profiles

Students should also be familiar with the basics of the Linux command line.  In addition, the following general technical knowledge should be well understood:

• Layer 2 Ethernet and ARP networking concepts
• Layer 3 and 4 TCP/IP networking concepts, including IP addressing and subnetting
• Layer 7 HTTP networking concepts
• Linux command line and basic Linux commands
• HTML

Finally, nice-to-have knowledge includes familiarity with programming and/or scripting languages, such as:

• JavaScript or NodeJS
• Python
• Bash