The Application Services 3 (AS3) Extension provides a simple and consistent way to automate layer 4–7 application services deployment on the BIG-IP platform via a declarative REST API. AS3 uses a well-defined object model represented as a JSON document. The declarative interface makes managing F5 application services deployments as code both simple and reliable.

The AS3 Extension ingests and analyzes the declarations and makes the appropriate iControl API calls to create the desired end state on the target BIG-IP instance. The extension can run either on the BIG-IP instance or via AS3 container, a separate container/VM that runs the AS3 Extension, and then makes external API calls to the BIG-IP instance. 

The Declarative Onboarding Extension makes it easy to take an F5 BIG-IP platform from post-initial boot to a system ready to deploy security and traffic management for applications. The simple interface enables you to configure system settings such as licensing and provisioning, network settings such as VLANs and self IPs, and clustering settings if you are using more than one BIG-IP system.

The Declarative Onboarding Extension uses a JSON schema consistent with the AS3 schema and has a similar architecture. The extension is supplied as a TMOS-independent RPM that is installed on a newly booted BIG-IP as the first step in the onboarding phase. Once the onboarding process has completed, you can deploy application services using whatever automated (or manual) process you select..

Cloud templates use the deployment automation functions of public and private clouds to provision and boot BIG-IP virtual appliances. F5 currently offers supported templates for the following clouds:

Public clouds

• AWS – Cloud Formation Templates
• Azure – Azure Resource Manager Templates
• Google – Google Deployment Manager Templates

Private clouds

• VMware - vCenter Templates
• OpenStack – Heat Orchestration Templates

F5 is actively expanding its cloud templates to cover a wider range of deployment scenarios. If you have suggestions or requests, please submit issues or (even better) pull requests via the relevant github repository.

The Telemetry Streaming Extension provides a declarative interface to configure the streaming of application, security, and network telemetry statistics and events generated by the BIG-IP platform to third-party consumers such as:

• Splunk
• Azure Log Analytics
• AWS CloudWatch
• AWS S3
• Graphite

As with the other members of the Automation Toolchain family, configuration is managed through a declarative interface using a simple, consistent JSON schema.