F5 Orchestrator

The F5 Orchestrator is an Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) compliant operator designed to assist you with the installation and management of the F5 BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes. It converts configurations from value files used in helm charts into CRDs, making it Kubernetes native. This simplifies the installation process for users, who only need to set up Service Accounts, FAR Secrets, CPCL Keys, and other necessary components before installing the orchestrator and applying the SPKInfrastructure and SPKInstance custom resources to configure F5 BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes. The orchestrator container manages the BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes installation. It monitors for any changes in the SPKInfrastructure and SPKInstance CRs that are responsible for product deployment. Whenever any change is detected, it reconciles the CRs with the existing deployment and applies the configurations accordingly.

Prerequisites

Perform helm login and apply FAR secret to pull the artifacts from FAR. For more information, see Artifacts via F5 Artifact Registry (FAR).

Install the Orchestrator

Note: If you choose to use your local registry, make sure to update the repository parameter in orchestrator-values.yaml and the imageRepository parameter in spkinstance-resource.yaml (see Apply SPKInstance CR) with your registry path.

  1. Create a Orchestrator helm override file with the contents below.

    vi orchestrator-values.yaml

    Contents:

    global:
  imagePullSecrets:
    - name: far-secret
image:
  repository: repo.f5.com/images
  pullPolicy: Always

Installation

  1. To install orchestrator, run:

    helm install orchestrator oci://repo.f5.com/charts/orchestrator --version v0.0.25-0.0.96 -f orchestrator-values.yaml

    Sample Output:

    NAME: orchestrator
LAST DEPLOYED: Thu Oct  3 13:13:32 2024
NAMESPACE: default
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1
TEST SUITE: None

  2. Check orchestrator pod status, run:

    kubectl get pods

    Sample Output:

    NAME                            READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
orchestrator-54759f8487-kgg6t   1/1     Running   0          3s

Next Steps: