Manual Chapter : Integrating Amazon Web Services

Applies To:

Show Versions Show Versions

BIG-IQ Cloud

  • 4.4.0
Manual Chapter

About Amazon Web Services (AWS) integration

BIG-IQ Cloud provides you with the tools to manage Amazon EC2 and CloudWatch resources required to perform application delivery. Management tasks include discovering and creating BIG-IP VE virtual machines located in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), application pool servers, and deploying applications. You can use these features to accommodate application traffic fluctuations by periodically adding and retracting devices and application servers, as needed. Additionally, you can provide tenants access to self-deployable iApps through Amazon EC2 integration.

To provide access to these services for Amazon EC2 tenants, you configure communication between Amazon EC2 products, and BIG-IQ Cloud. Then, you associate a Amazon EC2 cloud connector with a device, and create a catalog entry for a corresponding Amazon EC2 service profile. The tenants to whom you give access to the catalog entry see it in their applications panel. From there, they can use it to self-deploy their own iApps.

Creating an EC2 node as a tenant

Your provider must have already created a tenant user account that includes an EC2 connector, and supplied you with the connector reference.

Both tenants and providers can create EC2 nodes using either the user interface or a REST API call. A user with a role of tenant can create an EC2 node using the REST API.

  1. Authenticate with the F5 Cloud REST API, specifying a user role of Tenant.
    Tip: Refer to Authentication with the F5 REST API in the BIG-IQ Cloud Overview chapter of this guide for information about authentication strategies.
    Tip: Refer to the BIG-IQ Cloud Service API Reference Guide for details about using the APIs required for this task.
  2. Create a new EC2 node using the Create Node API to specify all of the details required for this node. /cm/cloud/tenants/{tenant}/nodes POST
    Important: Use the connector reference supplied by your provider when you are specifying the parameters for this node.
    The REST response you receive confirms that the new node has the parameter values you specified.
The node you created is now available for your cloud applications to use.

Viewing activity for cloud resources

Before you can view dynamic cloud resource activity, you must have an EC2 cloud connector with the Device Elasticity setting enabled.
Viewing activity for dynamic cloud resources gives you insight into how cloud resources are expanding to address increased traffic to applications.
  1. To view the resource associated with a particular activity, click the activity located on the Activities panel. The associated objects are highlighted in the relevant panels.
  2. To view specific activity details, place your cursor on an activity. A popup window opens to display further details about the selected activity.