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Module 1: Imperative Automation with the BIG-IP iControl REST API

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In this module you will learn the basic concepts required to interact with the BIG-IP iControl REST API. Additionally, you will walk through a typical Device Onboarding workflow to deploy a fully functional BIG-IP Active/Standby pair. It’s important to note that this module will focus on demonstrating an Imperative approach to automation.

Note

The Lab Deployment for this lab includes two BIG-IP devices. For most of the labs, we will only be configuring the BIG-IP A device (management IP configuration and licensing has been completed). BIG-IP B will have some minimal configuration pre-loaded. In a real-world scenario, it would be necessary to perform Device Onboarding functions on ALL BIG-IP devices. In this lab exercise, we chose to perform it only on a single device due to lab time allocation constraints.

Note

In order to confirm the results of REST API calls made in this lab, it’s recommended to keep GUI/SSH sessions to the BIG-IP devices open. By default, BIG-IP will log all the REST API related events locally to restjavad.0.log . These logs can also be directed to a remote syslog server (see https://support.f5.com/csp/article/K13080). On a side note, the ltm log files listed below contains log messages specific to BIG-IP local traffic management events.

  • BIG-IP:
    • /var/log/ltm
    • /var/log/restjavad.0.log
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