Q/A with Betsson's Patrik Jonsson - DevCentral's Featured Member for April

Patrik Jonsson lives in Stockholm with his wife and son and works as a network engineer for a company providing online casino games across the world.

Outside work, he likes to spend time with his family, play around with his home VMware lab and enjoys watching movies. He also loves travelling and having a beer with friends.

Patrik is also a 2017 DevCentral MVP and DevCentral’s Featured Member for April! DevCentral got a chance to talk with Patrik about his work, life and his project the BIG-IP Report.

DevCentral: You’ve been a very active contributor to the DevCentral community and wondered what keeps you involved?

Patrik: One of the best, and fun ways to learn new things is to take on problems, or discussions presented by fellow technicians. It forces you to continuously challenge what you think you know and keeps your knowledge up to date. In addition, when I need input, or help myself, DevCentral has so many brilliant and helpful members ready to take on whatever you throw at them.

DC: Tell us a little about the areas of BIG-IP expertise you have.

PJ: The first time I ran into a BIG-IP was just after I graduated from university. It was a 1000 series running BIG-IP v4. When I quit that job 6 years later I considered asking to bring it home with me, but somehow my girlfriend at the time was not as keen to the idea. Still don’t know why. :-) 

I’ve been working mostly with BIG-IP LTM and iControl, but recently I’ve started to dabble a bit with APM, GTM/DNS and ASM as well.

DC: You are a Network Security Specialist at Betsson. Can you describe your typical workday?

PJ: At Betsson you never know what’s going to happen when you step into the office. The gaming industry has very tough competition and getting comfortable as one of the bigger players around is not an option since rivals are always ready to take your place. This, combined with awesome colleagues, makes it a joy to step into the office every morning.

DC: Describe one of your biggest BIG-IP challenges and how DevCentral helped in that situation.

PJ: Being a multinational company with offices supporting multiple brands, one of the biggest challenges we have is knowledge sharing. Giving the developers the correct information when they need it is vital for an efficient application delivery. In order to provide this, we have used iRules to present troubleshooting information in the form of custom headers so developers can see which pool and member that responded to their request and the current status of all members. We also have a smarter version of the traditional sorry page which shows information about the failed pool and what’s being monitored. And then of course, BIG-IP Report. 

All of these are using iRules and iControl and would not have been possible without the DevCentral API documentation and of course, my hero Joe Pruitt.

DC: What can readers learn from your blog: https://loadbalancing.se/ and what is the BIG-IP Report?

PJ: My blog is where I post ideas and projects that I have. There’s a BIG-IP APM + Google Authenticator guide, F5 Web UI augmentation script for version 11 and a few other things. 

BIG-IP Report was born out of a need to show people the load balancing configuration in a simple manner without giving them access to the BIG-IP interface. After implementing it we have gone from developers asking us where things are, to instead them telling us about bad configuration. We also discovered that it is awesome for us as well, as we can get an overview of the configuration across multiple devices. Finding a specific VIP, or pool is so much easier when the information is in one place. 

I guess the best way to understand it is to try it at http://loadbalancing.se/bigipreportdemo/ 

The blog is not updated that often, so it’s safe to subscribe without getting too much spam.

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?

PJ: I think my dream would be working with a non-profit organization helping people in need. I love travelling and combining that with something meaningful would be really nice.

Thanks Patrik! Check out all of Patrik’s DevCentral contributions, check out his blog, or connect on LinkedIn. And visit Betsson on the web or follow on Twitter.