BIG IP as a load balancer for service discovery
Hello Group,
I am very new to BIG IP and have basic questions not answered through the documents:
- What I do not understand is each load balancer has its own native configuration format and so does BIG IP; how does that map to a Consul Template or do I set up the Consul template to match that of the BIG IPs internally recognized configuration file, which would mean I need to know what the configuration file looks?
I am trying to set up a server side discovery for microservices. Many examples out there but not for F5 BIG IP.
Microservices will be running in docker containers inside k-Pods. I want to set up an external service registry and external Load balancer to manage north-south traffic to the container services. k-clusters will be set up by environment: dev, uat, PAT and prod.
If a common Load balancer is used what are the ways to route an HTTP request coming from a service outside the k-pod via this load balancer into a microservices. If the external service wants to talk to a SIT microservice, I want the load balancer to know to route it to the right URL in SIT. Should the caller service pass a service ID and an environment identifier in the payload which the load balancer extracts and uses to narrow down its search on the location of the right SIT service?
I am also thinking iControlRestAPI and iRules could be used to solve this problem?
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks Adam