Is it May
already? Did you enjoy your ‘May the Fourth’ along with ‘Revenge of the Sixth’?
For me, May is filled with a bunch of family holidays along with Mother’s Day,
of course. May also falls perfectly for our 5th installment of the
#DC Chronicles. If you missed our initial issues of the DC Chronicles, you can
catch up with the links at the bottom. The Chronicles are intended to keep you
updated on DevCentral happenings and highlight some of the cool content you may
have missed since the last issue. Welcome!
We’re
only 3 months away from #F5Agility18
in Boston, August 13-16! You can hang out with the DevCentral team and many MVPs will also be in attendance to
share their expertise. Our team is prepping some sessions and look forward to
socializing with the community. Get
the details here and now's the time to register for F5
Agility 2018 and lock in your labs and sessions. Also, Early Birds get $300
off the registration fee Through
May 18!
If you
haven’t heard, BIG-IP
Cloud Edition is will be available soon! BIG-IP Cloud Edition is built by
tightly integrating BIG-IQ Centralized
Management and BIG-IP
Per-App VEs to deliver advanced application services and management. You
can autoscale, offer self-service management for app owners, and per-app
analytics. We got a couple cool pieces covering Cloud Edition: Chase’s Skies
Never Looked So Good With BIG-IP Cloud Edition where he explains all the
pieces of the pie and also check out Jason’s Lightboard
Lessons: BIG-IP Cloud Edition Overview.
We
also dropped a couple other #LightBoardLessons for your viewing pleasure
covering some of our new Security solutions. John lights up the DDoS
Hybrid Defender and introduces us to the new F5
Advanced WAF. DDoS Hybrid Defender offers comprehensive DDoS threat
coverage in a simple, dedicated appliance with native, cloud-based scrubbing
services and the awesome Advanced WAF protects against the latest attacks using
behavioral analytics, proactive bot defense, and application-layer encryption
of sensitive data. Couple of cool tools to help mitigate internet threats.
Mitigate
threats you say? There will always be vulnerabilities in the wild and depending
on the type of threat, we’ll typically have some mitigation techniques to
share. Our SIRT
(Security Incident Response Team) folks are always examining the murk out there
and sharing insights. This past month is no different with mitigation
techniques for Remote
Code Execution with Spring Data Commons (CVE-2018-1273), Directory
Traversal with Spring MVC on Windows (CVE-2018-1271) and the Drupal
Core Remote Code Execution (CVE-2018-7602). In a few cases, BIG-IP ASM
customers were already protected by the existing signatures!
As we wrap
up this edition, we’d also like to point out @GrahamAlderson‘s new video
series AppSec Made Easy with examples for Anti-Bot
for Mobile APIs, Proactive
Bot Defense, L7
Behavioral DoS and a couple more this week. And we’d be remiss if we
didn’t call out Bank of America’s Jai
Kumar as our Featured Member for May!
As always,
You can stay engaged with @DevCentral by following us on Twitter, joining our LinkedIn Group or
subscribing to our YouTube
Channel. Look forward to hearing about your BIG-IP adventures.
ps
The Chronicles:
Our
Featured Member series is a way for us to show appreciation and highlight
active contributors in our community. Communities thrive on interaction and our
Featured Series gives you some insight on some of our most active folks.
Jai Kumar is a very active
contributor on DevCentral and has been for a number of years amassing 4 #DC
badges. We're excited to name Jai as our Featured Member for May.
Let's learn
a bit more about Jai.
DevCentral:
please explain to the DC community a little about yourself, what you do and why
it’s important.
Jai Kumar: From my childhood
(Kid born in 90's lol), I always thought and was eager to know how Internet and
the entire network stuffs worked. That’s how my passion came - “I want to be a
network engineer” and here I am a Network Engineer (Still lot to learn). I am Jai
Kumar, living in Chennai (India). My close ones call me Jai. Got Married last
November and have a loving spouse. Enjoy watching thriller/crime seasons and a
big fan of G.O.T, Breaking Bad, Prison Break, Dexter. The list goes on… Now
it’s Mr.Robot. An ardent reader of THN
and I’m a workaholic!!!
I enjoy
working for Bank of America
providing Engineering and design of traffic management for consumers. This
includes global traffic management, application load balancing, traffic routing
and advanced health check services.
As a team we
play a major role in providing architecture and high level design guidance for
BOA. As well as oversight of design and engineering services provided by our
partners. Work with business to understand future trends and roadmap emerging
requirements.
DC: You
are very active contributor in the DevCentral community. What keeps you
involved?
JK: I don’t recall when
I joined DevCentral, but I’m sure it would have been for an iRule or to do
something with device hardware RMA/upgrade challenges I faced in my start of
career. DevCentral has molded me in tremendous ways. I have learned so many
technical things which I haven’t faced in my working place. That’s what special
about DevCentral is. You cannot expect to know everything, things may run
differently.
Sometimes you’d be able to reproduce the other people’s issue and
fix it – You gain knowledge, sometime you don’t – So you learn when someone
answers. One of my favorite quotes of Benjamin Franklin:“Tell me
and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
DevCentral
is a great forum where great minds come to help out others issue. The
involvement of every engineer out there to help the fellow F5 mate is what
makes special of DC community. And with whatever knowledge I have, I’d love to
give back to the community too.
DC: Tell
us a little about the areas of BIG-IP expertise you have.
JK: I could be the
youngest DC member holding less than 5 years of overall IT experience. I
specialize in BIG-IP LTM and GTM. I started from the basics as I was in the
monitoring team in my 1st year. Happened to learn the metrics that
were being monitored on F5 devices, how monitoring works, what action requires
to be taken at such scenarios. Then moved to the next device level
troubleshooting issues. Did 50 plus device replacements, HDD reseats, cable
issues etc. Next comes the design of setups for applications. Over the last 3
years, have been engaging with application owners and creating LB environments.
Had attended hands on virtual LAB trainings on BIG-IP ASM and AFM. Never got
chance to learn deeper getting involved in real time practice, maybe in future,
someday !!!
DC: You
are a Senior Software Engineer/F5 Engineer at Bank of America. Can you describe
your typical workday and how you manage work/life balance?
JK:
At
Bank of America, we live our
values, deliver our purpose and drive responsible growth through our eight
lines of business.
Our values –
“DART”• Deliver together • Act responsibly • Realize the power of
our people • Trust
the team
My work life
style is simple, Mon – Fri, I have a general shift and a rotational on-call. We
have a bunch of great minds in the team. Like every org, we do too have ticketing
tools, accept tickets and troubleshoot, build environment for the application
team. Get assigned with Projects and also implement changes required from GIS
standpoint. Attend technical/management meeting, join TFG/brain storming
sessions.
I involve
myself in helping our Ops team on system level issues, being a primary POC for
device level issues within the team. In the background, I see opportunities to
automate things wherever I feel I can. Got awarded multiple times for
automating.
In BOA, we
are encouraged to give back to the society, so I do participate in Bank of
America Community Volunteering. Enjoying a good work/life balance overall.
Maybe blessed or being lucky.
DC:
Describe one of your biggest BIG-IP challenges and how DevCentral helped in that situation.
JK: One of our F5’s
Configuration utility failed to display SSL certificates, same happened when
you try to list all certificates through CLI. This really ate lot of my time.
Then I happened to learn from F5 articles and DC to enable mcpd to find the
actual single cert which was causing this issue. It was containing special
chars in the subject. Because of which we were unable to install any of the
certs at all. After fixing the particular cert, things got back normal.
Later we
involved the right teams to let them know to avoid these scenarios in future.
But I’m yet to face stronger challenges, after all I’m just 5 years in Industry
now.
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?
JK: It was always to be a
Network Security Engineer. Well during my final year in college, I got 2 job
offers for a CORE company (Embedded Systems electronics) and a voice process
company. But I had not much of a real interest. So I looked for openings
outside and was interviewed by Vodafone Enterprise and got selected. That’s
where my carrier started and I’m thankful for that.
Thanks
Jai! Check out all of Jai's DevCentral
contributions
and connect with him on LinkedIn
and follow Bank of America on Twitter.
If there
is a DevCentral member you think should be featured, let us know in the
comments section!
