f5 automation: BIG-IQ vs Ansible vs AS3 - your preferences?

Hi All,

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I'm a little overwhelmed with options with automation and F5 BIG-IPs, there seem to be many ways to slice the cake. Just the few technologies listed in the title can be used in many ways:

- Ansible directly

- AS3 directly

- BIG-IQ templates

- Ansible running DO directly

- Ansible running AS3

- AS3 via BIG-IQ

- Ansible running AS3 via BIG-IQ

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I want to keep things simple and the goal is to have everything in declarative text files. This seems to me to be:

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- Run declarative on-boarding for configuration such as hostname & networking details (maybe via Ansible)

- Run AS3 scripts directly on BIG-IP devices to create L4-7 objects (probably not by Ansible)

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I do want to use Big-IQ/DCD for statistics collection and monitoring but using it for templates or a proxy to deploy AS3 to me seems just an extra step and not keeping things simple.

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Some questions even this simple set up raises is:

- If I want to add another network or vlan later can that be done via declarative on-boarding?

- If I want to change a virtual server, should I trust AS3 and reapply via POST or only apply the changes via PATCH?

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Or does anyone have something completely out of left field as a better way to do everything?

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Hopefully there are a few of you out there that have been through this struggle and have some links to good resources (please). F5 documentation seems to be a bit everywhere (supporting multiple ways to do things) and DevNet seems to have had a cull during a recent migration so half the questions on google return 404 pages.

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Thanks for your time reading this. Cheers!