Forum Discussion
A lot depends on what you are trying to do. From the BigIP's perspective what is in the packets is only relevant if you want the BigIP to do something with them based on data in that layer. So, for instance, if you wanted us to load balance based on data in the HTTP headers or the request, then you would need to have an HTTP profile on the virtual server and either use Local Traffic Policies or iRules. If you want to use a layer3 or layer4 load balancing method, this would not be needed.
So lets say that you want to evenly distribute traffic across a pool of three rest servers, the BigIP can simply round robin route traffic to these servers, possibly persisting based on source address of the request. We don't need to know that you are using REST, or even that the traffic is HTTP. We look at the incoming packet, determine which server gets requests from that IP, generate an entirely new TCP packet destined for that Server's IP address, and send the request on as we received it.
Now if you wanted to rewrite the POST, you would need to have an HTTP profile, and would likely require some additional logic via iRules, local traffic policies, etc. But if it's a standards compliant HTTP request/Method we can work with it.
So no, the BigIP only needs to be a microservice gateway if you decide that you want it to change the REST request in some way.