This course introduces network administrators, operators, and DevOps engineers to the foundational and F5 Networks-specific technologies required to automate BIG-IP in public and private clouds. 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 work with and deploy automation in the cloud.

• Understand the role of automation for public and private clouds
• 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 the work together to configure BIG-IP
• Use flow control elements such as conditionals and looping in Ansible Playbooks
• Stand up and configure BIG-IP applications using Ansible
• Understand the role of containers and microservices and how they are used in the cloud to create complex applications
• Create a basic web service application using Docker containers
• Use BIG-IP to load balance multiple docker containers
• Use Application Services 3 to declaratively configure BIG-IP applications
• Describe the source of truth for each lab exercise

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

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

In addition, the following general technical knowledge should be well understood:

• Layer 3 and 4 TCP/IP networking concepts, including IP addressing and subnetting
• Layer 2 Ethernet and ARP networking concepts
• 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

• Configuring BIG-IP with iControl REST
• Configuring BIG-IP programmatically with Ansible
• Introduction to Docker and Microservices
• Configuring BIG-IP declaratively with Applications Services 3