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F5 Beacon SRE Demo

license standard-readme compliant

This document covers the initial setup and configuration of the SRE Demo as demonstrated on the most recent webinar.

Table of Contents

Click to expand

Security

F5 Telemetry Streaming services (TS) operate over HTTPS using OAuth2 authorisation.

Background

This is a How To Guide to replicate, with references to the underlying infrastructure of additional testing would like to be explored, this will cover just the steps required to complete configuration for NGINX+, BIG-IP & F5aaS Beacon.

Prerequisites

To support this deployment pattern the following components are required:

Optional

If there is the desire to install the full demo stack the additional tools/accounts are suggested:

Installation

This section covers the configuration for the deployment of the example application as demonstrated in the recent Beacon webinar. This flow is built around the assumed deployment pattern that is similar to F5-SRE-Demo, the additional steps required for that deployment to replicate the webinar environment are contained in the Configuration section of this How To.

Initially the sign-up for both F5 CloudServices and DataDog Trial account for the purpose of testing is covered here in this section, DataDog Agents are a technical requirement at time of writing as Telemetry Streaming is not support with NGINX+.

The deployment architecture is deployed as a Auto Scaling AWAF Instances as indicated in the diagram below;

Beacon

F5 Beacon is a Cloud Services SaaS offering that provides both insights and analytics, this demonstration video provides a greater understanding of Beacon's current capabilities.

Also, as it coincides with this demo Beacon also has a 45 free day trial period so you may use and explore how Beacon provides insights to organisational needs.

The Beacon Getting Started Guide will provide a good starting point, work with F5 Beacon to explore many additional resources.

Sign up for you trial Beacon account, along with other F5 Cloud Services offerings at F5 Cloud Services

DataDog

Explore your stack with a free Datadog trial, try Datadog for 14 days and learn how seamlessly uniting metrics, traces, and logs in one platform improves agility, increases efficiency, and provides end-to-end visibility across your entire stack.

DataDog insights and metrics are used in combination with NGINX+ provides logs and metrics of the instances used in this demo.

BIG-IP

The deployment environment used for development is covered in detail F5 SRE Demo, this is a AWS Deployment example of Auto-scaling AWAF. For simplicity, steps replicate this deployment are as follows;

a) First, clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/merps/f5-sre-demo.git

b) Second, create a tfvars file in the following format to deploy the environment;

Inputs

Name Description Type Default Required
cidr CIDR Range for VPC String NA Yes
region AWS Deployment Region String NA Yes
azs AWS Availability Zones List NA Yes
secops-profile Security Operations AWS Profile String default Yes
customer Customer/Client Short name used for AWS Tag/Naming String customer No
environment Environment Short name name used for AWS Tag/Naming String demo No
project Project Short name name used for AWS Tag/Naming String project No
ec2_key_name EC2 Key-pair for Instance Creation String NA Yes

c) Third, initialise and plan the Terraform deployment as follows:

cd f5-sre-demo/
terraform init
terraform plan --vars-file ../variables.tfvars

this will produce and display the deployment plan using the previously created varibles.tfvars file.

d) Then finally to deploy the successfully plan;

terraform apply --vars-file ../variables.tfvars

NOTE: This architecture deploys two c4.2xlage PAYG BIG-IP Marketplace instances, it is recommended to perform a terraform destroy to not incur excessive usage costs outside of free tier.

This deployment also covers the provisioning of the additional F5 prerequisite components so required for deployment example covered in the F5 SRE Demo

NGINX

As with the installation of BIG-IP, this How To is based on that deployment. To replicate this deployment please refer to the well documented process of Deploying NGINX and NGINX Plus on Docker otherwise the steps outlined in the Configuration section outline what is required for a WordPress

As with other products and services, NGINX+ also offers a free license period that you can request here where you can also trial additional modules of NGNIX+

Configuration

BIG-IP

As with DataDog, detailed instructions for the deployment and configuration for TS is located at F5 Telemetry Streaming.

As previously, steps to configure;

  1. Update TS declarations as this example;
{
    "class": "Telemetry",
    "TS_System": {
        "class": "Telemetry_System",
        "systemPoller": {
            "interval": 60,
            "enable": true,
            "trace": false,
            "actions": [
                {
                    "setTag": {
                        "tenant": "`T`",
                        "application": "`A`"
                    },
                    "enable": true
                }
            ]
        },
        "enable": true,
        "trace": false,
        "host": "localhost",
        "port": 8100,
        "protocol": "http"
    },
    "TS_Listener": {
        "class": "Telemetry_Listener",
        "port": 6514,
        "enable": true,
        "trace": false,
        "match": "",
        "actions": [
            {
                "setTag": {
                    "tenant": "`T`",
                    "application": "`A`"
                },
                "enable": true
            }
        ]
    },
    "Poller":{ 
       "class":"Telemetry_System_Poller",
       "interval":60,
       "enable":true,
       "trace":false,
       "allowSelfSignedCert":false,
       "host":"localhost",
       "port":8100,
       "protocol":"http"
    },
    "Beacon_Consumer":{ 
        "class":"Telemetry_Consumer",
        "type":"Generic_HTTP",
        "host":"ingestion.ovr.prd.f5aas.com",
        "protocol":"https",
        "port":50443,
        "path":"/beacon/v1/ingest-telemetry-streaming",
        "method":"POST",
        "enable":true,
        "trace":false,
        "headers":[ 
           { 
            "name":"grpc-metadata-x-f5-ingestion-token",
            "value":"`>@/passphrase`"
           }
        ],
        "passphrase":{ 
            "cipherText":"<this is the secret>"
    }
}
  1. Push updated TS declaration to BIG-IP.

DataDog

The configuration component is divided into two sections, Docker Agent and the associated metrics.

Beacon

The deployment of the WordPress NGINX+ Docker example is documented and deployed with use of the deployment pattern as described within F5 SRE Demo where the application is deployed via API.

For the purpose of this How To, it will use the F5 Beacon API Postman collection

NGINX+

For both ease and simplicity, this section builds upon the Docker deployment with the use of a docker-compose, this detailed in wordpress-nginx-docker-compose

Usage

As per TODO

API

As per TODO

TODO

List of task to make the process my automated;

  • Push updated SRE code as per Docker Compose refactor
  • Workflow improvements for DO/AS3/TS
  • Quick Snippets for Docker Compose Spin Up.

Contributing

See the contributing file!

PRs accepted.

Filing issues

If you find an issue, we would love to hear about it. You have a choice when it comes to filing issues:

  • Use the Issues link on the GitHub menu bar in this repository for items such as enhancement or feature requests and non-urgent bug fixes. Tell us as much as you can about what you found and how you found it.

ChangeLog

2020-00-17

  • Corrected Use Casefolder path

2020-06-16

License

Apache © merps.