F5 Distributed Cloud, from manual configuration to Terraform automation
In this article, I will briefly introduce the "F5 Distributed Cloud (XC) Terraform Examples" GitHub repository, aimed at centralizing a number of essential Distributed Cloud Security-focused use cases, along with the corresponding manual (XC console-based) configuration and Terraform automation guides.
The use cases are grouped by the main areas of WAAP (WAF, API Security and Bot Protection), along with a Secure Multi-Cloud Networking (S-MCN) section. Each use case is represented by the mapping between a DevCentral overview article, designed to illustrate the problem to be solved and the business value, and the corresponding manual and automation (Terraform) user guides to be followed to implement the solution.
The manual (XC console) user guide provides step-by-step instruction on how to setup a working configuration that will solve a particular problem or showcase a certain feature. The corresponding automation guide shows the settings necessary to deploy the same setup via Terrafom scripts. The novelty here is using Github Actions to pipeline the automation steps and Terrafom Cloud to maintain the state, enabling deployments to be run without the need to locally install any tools (such as Terrafom), ensuring maximum portability. All that a user needs to do is to clone this repository, configure a small number of Github and Terraform Cloud variables, as described in each user guide, and trigger the appropriate Github Action.
To make onboarding even easier, a select number of use cases were presented in a "teachable" format, where the user is guided through the configuration by short courses.
Here is a short presentation of this Github repository: