DevCentral’s Featured Member for August – Piotr Lewandowski

Piotr Lewandowski has been working in IT for well over 20 years – and not really conscious decision to go this way – just blind luck. He started in the era without Internet…yes, not so long ago it was possible to live without Internet J…and IBM PC/XT computers. Thanks to self-learning he managed to work as DTP operator on Apple computers (the first in Poland at the time). However, he also had to manage all the other aspects of “network” so he turned into IT guy. Then he worked as CIO for quite a long time but when company started to grow, he figured out the corporate environment is not for him and switched to consulting on his own terms.

About 5 years ago, F5 gear popped up and he had to learn how to use it. It was challenging as he never was network pro – but turned out that it’s interesting and challenging so he’s still there and is DevCentral’s Featured Member for August!

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

Piotr: It’s a shame but I am still best in Load Balancing related part. I am struggling to improving in more trendy areas – security and AAA but it takes time. Especially security in the WAF area. It is so broad and fast moving that I have problem staying current. I am able to configure most all pieces of BIG-IP LTM and GTM features, but for ASM, APM and AFM it is still a bit of a challenge. 

I am not a programmer but during some projects I learned both iRules and iControl so I am comfortable with those. Lately I started to research iRulesLX – which seems very promising – but not a lot info about real life project can be found.
I’ve also dabbled a bit with BIG-IP/OpenStack topic and have a good idea how it works but still need to deploy in a production environment. 

Recently I decided to improve my skills in dynamic routing protocols (BGP, OSPF etc.) to be able to address DDoS related topics (RTBH, RHI, Anycast). Somewhat challenging but my lab is growing and I am starting to see some light in the tunnel - Polish proverb – don’t know if valid in English.

DC: You are a Technical Consultant at SoftwareDefined. Can you describe your typical workday?

Piotr: I am working for few businesses, right now my most active relations are with SoftwareDefined. To be honest, right now there is plenty of projects including some areas I am not so fluent, so most of my time is devoted to learning and testing. 

Most of my day is filled in with lab work – testing how BIG-IP works behind scenes (which is the only way I can be 100% sure that given implementation will work as expected); recreating different bizarre customer configs to find out how to implement/improve them; and “reverse engineering” BIG-IP features to figure out if impossible is possible. ;-) 

I also stay current with DevCentral stuff. 

There are of course days when it’s necessary to work directly with customer – explain how BIG-IP can be used, why it’s so great and how their life will be easier after buying few, especially VIPRIONs! 

Part of my tasks is a technical support for customers we are working with. Bright side is that we are working with ones that are pretty skillful in the BIG-IP area – so cases are interesting and challenging and always learning something new and useful

DC: You were a CIO right when the internet started to blossom in the mid-1990s thru the 2000s. What are some of the advancements that truly surprised you?

Piotr: Good catch! To be honest I barely remember how it was… but for sure not worse than it is now. 

I guess there are two main topics that I am amazed most. One you can surely call advancement, second is really mystery for me – you can call it advancement but…
Advancement is vast ocean of information out there. Right now – if you know what you are looking for and how to triage search results – one can find info he needs in few minutes. Even if I have no idea at all about given topic it’s always possible to find some starting point and proceed from there. That was not possible without Internet – sure you could call friend and try to find books but it would take ages – and there is no time for that nowadays. 

I do want to express that I love DevCentral (and I am honest here, not just trying to flatter). I know communities of few other big vendors and there is no comparison for my needs. I can’t recall situation when I was not able at least find clue that allowed me to resolve issue. There is so much valuable info and great people on DevCentral that it creates great value by itself! 

“Advancement.” I can’t understand is how easily people are sharing very private info on the Internet and at the same time how fiercely they are finding for their privacy – that is paradox I can’t figure out. 

I am dinosaur here, still prefer few good friends in real life that thousands of virtual friends out there. To be honest, for me social part of the Internet could not exist at all.
Most amazing progress (somehow for sure related to Internet) for me is Big Data, machine learning and AI. What is even more amazing is that those are seldom seen in networking/ADC area. All the networking protocols, security, LB and so on was designed with main goal – computer should be able to understand and use them – not humans. And computers are good at it – opposite to most humans. Share amount of data, speed of changes it is all making reaction by humans almost impossible.
So why still humans are doing all this mundane task of configuring, tuning and adjusting? For me, right direction is handing this all out to computers. Something like IoT. All should be based on intelligent entities that are aware about surrounding environment, can self-tune/reconfigure, self-protect, actively fight for resources and finally self-destroy. 

Even if that is scary and still far away there are areas that should be changed/improved. Simple example the BIG-IP courtyard – TCP optimization. This is very complicated and mundane task to adjust all those settings live. But device processing traffic has all data necessary to do that and understands this data better than most BIG-IP users ever can.
Another, maybe not so obvious area is why network is not aware about business data. Not all traffic is of the same value for business so network/ADC should actively readjust configuration based on business data. It’s is totally possible when whole IT infrastructure works as one conscious, intelligent organism but impossible to be done in real time by humans.

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

Piotr: Each new implementation is challenge, but I guess I can recall two that almost make me fall to my knees: 

OpenStack and BIG-IP integration – plenty of new technologies I never touched before. Steep learning curve and relatively small amount of good quality info (it was a year ago, I am pretty sure now it’s much better). 

“Reverse engineering” of BIG-IP APM/SWG to figure out if proxy chaining is possible (especially for HTTPS) or not. Here I had to really harness my iRules skills. Thanks to that, I was able to figure out how things work behind scenes and unfortunately find out that task is impossible to implement in manageable way – to be honest even with v13.0.0 seems to be impossible.

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?

Piotr: Nothing related to IT. I am not saying it’s not fun but… I guess I would try to be archeologist, revealing secrets of the past always thrilled my mind. Probably not in the human past area, rather few dozen million years back when dinosaurs ruled Earth. I was always curious what would happen if big impact would not happen. And finally this job seems to allow to visit really distant and mysterious parts of the world. 

Thanks Niels! Check out all of Piotr' DevCentral contributions, connect with him on LinkedIn and visit SoftwareDefined.

Q/A with SpringCM's Joel Newton - DevCentral's Featured Member for August

 Joel Newton is a Senior DevOps System Engineer at SpringCM, a current DevCentral MVP and DevCentral’s Featured Member for August!

SpringCM believes in leveraging technology to deliver immediate savings by automating and accelerating business processes – essentially, bringing the power of the cloud to contract and document management. SpringCM was using BIG-IP LTM to load-balance their application servers when Joel started there four years ago, and he stepped into the role of being the primary BIG-IP admin, managing the VIPs, pools, and iRules. In addition to managing the BIG-IP LTM, he’s also an architect of their continuous delivery and configuration management systems. Outside of work, he enjoys philosophy, genealogy, spending time with his family, and being a craft beer evangelist (as well as drinking craft beer).
DevCentral got a chance to talk with Joel about his work, life and how DevOps & DevCentral have more in common than just the word ‘Dev.’

DevCentral: Hi Joel, thanks for your time! You are a current DevCentral MVP and have been a tremendous contributor to our community over the years. What keeps you involved?

Joel: I think it’s that DevCentral is a very active community, with a lot of smart people trying to solve a lot of interesting problems. Just perusing the most recent questions can be a great way to learn things.
My initial interest in DevCentral was sparked by Joe Pruitt’s docs on iControl and all the PowerShell knowledge and examples he provided. After a while, I realized that having a PowerShell module to manage LTMs might be beneficial, so I developed that and shared it with the community.

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

JN: SpringCM primarily uses the BIG-IP LTM module and iControl REST. We built and host a large, complex, public-facing web application, and as such we have hundreds of servers that require load balancing. Since we have so many servers, our goal is to do as much of the administration as possible via scripts and command line, which is where iControl REST comes in. With PowerShell and iControl REST, we’re able to configure virtual servers, pools, pool members and iRules.

DC: You are part of a DevOps team at SpringCM. Can you explain how DevCentral helps with DevOps challenges?

JN: I think DevOps is just a fancy term for the attempt to achieve better system process automation and better system visibility. Anything that allows one to programmatically change settings and retrieve information about one’s systems (such as iControl and iControl REST, and all the PowerShell /Perl /python snippets shared on DevCentral) aids people doing DevOps.

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

JN: SpringCM has wanted to do continuous delivery for a while. Instead of doing monolithic quarterly deployments of the entire production environment, we want to get to where we’re deploying to select servers during the day with zero downtime, as needed. A big part of this is being able to automate the management of BIG-IP pool members.

We’ve been doing zero-downtime deployments to production on a smaller scale to dozens of servers, but just recently, we accomplished our first “hot” (zero-downtime) deployment of our entire production environment (around 350 servers). This was only possible because we were able to use iControl REST and PowerShell scripts to have pool members disable themselves, wait until their connections dropped below a defined threshold, update their code, and re-enable themselves in their pool.

DC: We’re in your hometown, Chicago, this week for F5 Agility 2016. What are you looking forward to at Agility?

JN: I’ve signed up for some iRules labs, as well as one on BIG-IQ. We have some iRules that I inherited and have tweaked as needed, but I don’t feel that I’ve yet got a comprehensive picture on all that I could be using iRules for in our application. I’m looking forward to that, as well as getting a good intro to BIG-IQ.

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?

JN: Probably a full-time craft beer evangelist.

DC: Thanks Joel! Check out all of Joel’s DevCentral contributions and follow him on GitHub or connect on LinkedIn. And follow SpringCM: @springcm

Control It All with iControl

The concept of Application programming interfaces (APIs) has been around for a while.
According to CSC Distinguished Engineer & Chief Product Architect (and bass player) Martin Bartlett,

'The concept of an API pre-dates even the advent of personal computing, let alone the Web, by a very long time! The principal of a well-documented set of publicly addressable "entry points" that allow an application to interact with another system has been an essential part of software development since the earliest days of utility data processing. However, the advent of distributed systems, and then the web itself, has seen the importance and utility of these same basic concepts increased dramatically.’ (Courtesy: http://history.apievangelist.com/)

An API is a set of routine definitions, protocols, and tools for building software and applications. It is software written to function as a communication bridge between Web applications. That’s how iControl started according to Joe Pruitt – as a way for the early versions of BIG-IP LTM (BIG-IP) and BIG-IP DNS (3-DNS/GTM) to communicate with each other to ensure they were making the right traffic management decisions. And this was 16 years ago!

Today, APIs are all over place running behind the curtains without any direct user interaction. They are primarily used for computer consumption and typically absorbed by web applications. APIs make services available for developers to build those same services into their applications. eBay, Amazon & AWS, Facebook, Twitter and Google Maps are some examples you might be familiar with. For instance, Google Maps has an API so developers can use the back-end services to create their own ‘maps.’ Maybe it is a map of restaurants in the vicinity of a hotel. The hotel website could use the Google maps API to show different shopping, eating or recreational activities in the area. They wouldn’t need to develop the maps nor house the data themselves.

With the Internet of Things (IoT), APIs allow you to share, manage, access and interact with your previously unconnected items like cameras, bicycles and even medicine bottles. And there are many IoT APIs that are available.

And that’s really the point with iControl.

Whether you’re looking to tweak a feature or spin up 500 new pool members, iControl can do it. Anything you can do via the command line or GUI, you can accomplish via iControl. And, you can do it programmatically so you don’t have to enter in every single command in the chain, or wake up someone at 3am during the change control window just to bleed the servers off a pool.

iControl is F5’s open, web services-based API that allows complete, dynamic, and programmatic control of control over nearly every aspect of both execution and configuration on BIG-IP systems. With iControl you can work like a wizard—add, modify, or configure your F5 device in real time. It is the primary means through which BIG-IP is integrated into both commercial management offerings and cloud computing environments. In short, iControl is a simple, light weight API that allows you programmatic access via Traffic Management Shell (tmsh) commands.

And now you can say, 'I control my infrastructure with iControl.'

ps

Related:

• Getting Started with iControl: History
• iControl REST 101: Getting Started
• iControl Roundtable: State of the State
• A Brief History of API-Based Web Applications

F5 DevCentral Solves Your BIG-IP Questions

In this lively chat at #F5Agility15, DevCentral members Joe Pruitt and Tony Hynes share a little history of how it has grown from a single server in 2003 to over 200,000 members today; how iRules, iControl, iCall and iControl interact with BIG-IP’s programmability features and how the community helps solve, share and answer some of the challenges of today’s hybrid environments. They also highlight the MVP program and some of the new personal customization coming soon.

ps

Related:

• F5Agility15 - The Preview Video
• Welcome to F5 Agility 2015
• Innovate, Expand, Deliver with F5 CEO Manny Rivelo
• Get F5 Certified at F5 Agility 2015
• Software Defined Data Center Made Easy with F5 and VMware
• F5 Agility 2015

Technorati Tags: f5,agility,f5agility15,devcentral,programmibility,irules,automation,silva,video,conference

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RSA 2014: API Integration (feat Marshall)

With software defining everything these days, Corey Marshall, F5 Security Solution Architect, discusses F5 API’s and how they integrate with other technology solutions. He talks about iCall, iRules, iControl and iApps and where each is applicable. BIG-IP Programmability.

   

ps

Related

• RSA 2014: Find F5
• RSA 2014: Anti-Fraud Solution (feat DiMinico)
• RSA 2014: Secure Web Gateway (feat Moses)
• RSA 2014: DDoS Protection (feat Bocchino)
• RSA 2014: High Performance IPS (feat Blair)
• RSA 2014 Customer Spotlight: CARFAX
• F5 at RSA 2014
• F5 Secure Web Gateway – Reference Architecture
• F5 Web Fraud Protection – Reference Architecture
• F5 Expands Synthesis Architecture with Advanced Web and Fraud Protection Services for Worry-Free Application and Internet Access
• F5 YouTube Channel

Technorati Tags: f5,rsa,rsac,api,icall,icontrol,irules,iapps,big-ip,silva,video

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