Month: July 2018

REDtalks.live #35 – How to get started

/ Nathan Pearce / 2 Comments

In this episode I’m joined by F5 Consultant, Vinnie Mazza, to hear his experiences with getting started on his programmability and automation journey. Vinnie shares with us how a project outside of work  inspired him to learn new skills that, coincidentally, are directly transferable to the workplace.

In this video you will see how, armed with no more than curiosity and a couple of Raspberry Pie’s, Vinnie revolutionized a local police training facility that was in dire need of improvement. The skills he learned from this project not only helped others but also took him on a journey through scripting languages and frameworks that turned him into the automation-ninja that many customers get to appreciate today.

Remember, listeners! Everyone starts from the beginning. Find a project, doesn’t have to be at work, and see what you can come up with.

Linked referenced in this episode:

Thanks for listening (and sorry for having some mic problems this week… New microphone ordered!)

REDtalks.live #34 – GitHub Integration v0.2 released

/ Nathan Pearce / 1 Comment

Greetings automators!!! I am delighted to be sharing with you the release of the GitHub Webhook Server for BIG-IP v0.2. w00t!

This release was a major re-write that touched almost every line of code. Why? Well, as with many early prototypes, in the first release I just wanted to see if it could be done. And from the experiment I learned a lot about integrating with GitHub, took a lot of notes, and, well, v0.2 is the result of all those findings: a more robust integration that you should totally take a look at yourself!

The two key adds to version 0.2 are:

  • deployment queuing – so we don’t DDoS the Control Plane with many concurrent declaration commits at once
  • octokit –  in v0.1 I used native HTTP calls to the GitHub API. In v0.2 I switched to the GitHub octokit/rest.js node module, which simplified a lot of code. And simple = robust.

There’s a couple other features I snuck in there, which you can see in this demonstration video:

 

If there are any features you’d like to see, please create a GitHub Issue against the repository, here: https://github.com/npearce/BigHook/issues

For more episode on Network Infrastructure as Code, go here: Network Configuration as Code

Thanks for listening!