Manage F5 BIG-IPs in GCP with Terraform Cloud

Introduction

IT Industry research, such as Accelerate, shows improving a company’s ability to deliver software is critical to their overall success. The following key practices and design principles are cornerstones to that improvement.

• Version control of code and configuration
• Automation of Deployment
• Automation of Testing and Test Data Management
• “Shifting Left” on Security
• Loosely Coupled Architectures
• Pro-active Notification

What’s the point

The demonstration resources described below show how tools like Git, HashiCorp Terraform, HashiCorp Sentinel, Chef Inspec and F5’s Automation Toolchain can be used to introduce some of the practices listed above to F5 BIG-IPs and the IT services they help deliver. By following along with the README in the demonstration repository, you should be able to run this demonstration and explore the implications for your own environments.

Caveats

• The particular source control approach shown in this demonstration is one of many. Before using this approach to support your Infrastructure as Code and Configuration Management assets and workflows, you should learn about different patterns of source code management and determine what best fits your team’s needs.
• In addition, these repositories use simplifying demonstration shortcuts for password, key, and network security. Production-ready enterprise designs and workflows should be used in place of these shortcuts.
  DO NOT ASSUME THAT THE CODE AND CONFIGURATION IN THESE REPOSITORIES IS PRODUCTION-READY
• A variety of tools are used in this demonstration. In most cases they are not exclusively required and can be replaced with other similar tools.

Setting up your demonstration automation host

Before running the demonstration code, you’ll need to set up the IDE host and the Azure account. Instructions for those steps may be found here

What’s next?

If you’ve followed along through the all of the use-cases in the demonstration repository, you’ve see the following:

• Source-controlled build of an application environment
• Managed changes with logging of authoring and approvals
• Automated scaling of application resources and BIG-IP configuration

If you want to realize the benefits of these practices for your IT service delivery, please reach out to your F5 account team.