He started to focus on F5 products as pre-sales engineer for a IT security distributor in charge of F5 development. 4 years ago, he joined Exiteam, a small company of two security engineers helping resellers audit, design and deploy security solutions for their customers. To provide real expertise, they both focus their skills on a small set of products. He works with F5 products about 80% of his time.
DevCentral got an opportunity to chat with Stanislas about his work, life and if European organizations have unique security requirements.
DevCentral: You’ve been an active contributor to the DevCentral community and wondered what keeps you involved?
Stanislas Piron: When I started working with F5 products, I created my DevCentral account to search piece of iRules and write my own iRules according to customer’s needs.
As the needs grew, I had some unanswered questions. Searching DevCentral, I found another approaches to solving issues, helping me to solve my own challenges. Each time I find a better way to solve my problems, I try to share my code.
I often read question and try to solve them thinking, “This can solve an issue of a customer I didn’t think about before”
DevCentral is a place where every time you help someone, you learn something.
DC: Tell us a little about the areas of BIG-IP expertise you have.
SP: My favorite BIG-IP product is APM (LTM+APM mode), which covers almost everything about authentication. It’s also the product we must configure as simple as possible if we do not want the customer to have headaches reading the access policy.
I often deploy BIG-IP with multiple modules including LTM, APM, AFM, GTM and ASM to offer high datacenter security.
Most of my deployments use the local traffic policies for standard admin tasks, iRules for application compatibility, and the tcl codes in APM to assign variable boxes.
DC: You are a Security Engineer with Exiteam, a security consulting practice. Can you explain how DevCentral helps with your daily challenges? Where does BIG-IP fit in the services you offer or within your own infrastructure?
SP: iRules is a great tool to solve problems BIG-IP is not addressing, but iRules is nothing without the developer’s community. DevCentral experts share experience not only about tcl coding but protocol knowledge, iRule events orders, and working iRules. And on the other side, some IT admins ask about new needs that I may answer for the next customer.
Each time I have a new challenge, I first search on DevCentral to see if someone already solved it. If not, I’ll create my own iRule.
DC: I understand you are in France and wondered, what are some of the unique information security challenges for European organizations?
SP: Information security challenges are not unique for European organizations as security risks are the same for all countries.
DC: Describe one of your biggest challenges and how DevCentral helped in that situation.
SP: With Microsoft Forefront TMG End of sale, most of my customers migrated to F5 products.
One of my customers, a SAAS provider, with almost exclusively Microsoft products (TMG, Exchange, Sharepoint, etc.) and with more than 20K concurrent users was evaluating how to migrate to BIG-IP LTM, ASM, APM and AFM.
During POC (and then deployment) we worked to get the same behavior with APM as TMG with SharePoint about office editing documents. I found some question on DevCentral with parts of an answer, but not the full answer. I wrote an iRule optimized for such a deployment (20K users) answering all the customer needs and shared it. Some DevCentral experts, who had the same needs, commented on it to make it simpler, generic and optimized.
DC: Lastly, if you weren’t an IT admin – what would be your dream job? Or better, when you were a kid – what did you want to be when you grew up?
SP I don’t remember what I wanted to be when I was child and IT is not a dream job if you don’t evolve. What I expect in my job is to not do the same job as the day before, and I think I found it. Every day, I meet new customers, I have new challenges and I learn something increasing my knowledge.
DC: Thanks Stanislas and congratulations! You can find Stanislas on LinkedIn and also check out his DevCentral contributions.
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