In an engaging interview with siliconANGLE Media, F5 Networks's Principal Solution Engineer Payal Singh discusses working with Ansible's network automation framework, DevOps and NetOps collaboration and more.
Integration and innovation with Ansible
"There are some people who are just starting out with Ansible. They just want to know 'How do I write a playbook with F5? How do I get it running?' Others are a little more advanced: 'Let’s get into roles; what are we doing with roles?' And then, now, collections are coming on top … we have the first collections out, we’re going to bundle playbooks and a lot of workflows and roles that are going to be easy for customers to just download, use these workflows out of the box and get started with F5," says Payal.
Asked what the integration is like as F5 works with Ansible, Payal added 'Contributing has been a little slow because, firstly, they’ve got to learn Ansible. Then they’ve got to learn what is Ansible Galaxy: 'How can I work around it?' And then there’s the networking piece. 'How do I now make it work with F5?' We’re working very closely with NetOps engineers, as well as DevOps engineers to kind of say, whatever you think is a good workflow is good enough to go there."
Payal also discussed collaboration "There are still a lot of silos — like NetOps guys are doing their stuff, DevOps guys are doing their stuff — but with automation, it’s kind of tying it in together. We are able to get them in the same room because we talk F5, and then we talk automation, and then they connect."
Offering an insight into consumer stories, Payal added "We get a lot of use cases for F5 that we want to be able to change an application or the network without incurring any downtime, you know failovers. It could be as broad as between data centers or something simple. But this company did want to failover between data centers. They got into Ansible. They were able to do it in minutes versus hours, and they loved it."
Read the complete siliconANGLE interview with Payal here, or watch the video version below.
Join impressive women proud to be #BeF5
Women at F5 are proud of the work they do and want to use their skills to help other women thrive in the tech industry.
If you want to make a difference in your career, search and apply for a job at F5 today.
Find out more
Disclosure: Where Women Work researches and publishes insightful evidence about how its paid member organizations support women's equality.