Module 5: Setup a Service scaling group (SSG) in Azure

In this module, we will learn about the Service Scaling Group (SSG) feature provided with BIG-IQ 6.1 in a the Azure environment.

The Service Scaling Group (SSG) gives us the capability to setup a cluster of BIG-IPs that will scale based on criterias defined by the administrator.

Service Scaling Group Topology

With BIG-IQ 6.1, the Service Scaling Group is composed of 2 tiers of ADCs. Depending on the environment, the implementation of the Service Scaling Group (SSG) will differ.

Environment Tier1 (called Service Scaler) Tier2 (called SSG)
Azure ALB F5 VE

Tier1/Service Scaler Management

With BIG-IQ 6.1, the provisioning and deployment of Tier1 is handle automatically by BIG-IQ.

Tier2/SSG Management

With BIG-IQ 6.1, the provisioning of SSG BIG-IPs is fully automated. You don’t have to setup anything upfront but licenses for BIG-IQ to assign to the dynamically provisioned BIG-IPs

To handle the provisioning and onboarding of our F5 virtual edition, we leverage different components:

Note

We will review this in more details in lab4

Application deployment in a SSG - Azure

To ensure the traffic goes through the SSG as expected, application will be deployed in a certain manner:

  • You will need dedicated Azure Load Balancer (AKA ALB previously) per application. The reason is that each ALB has one public IP/DNS Name (ie you can’t have 2 app runnings on port 443/HTTPS on a ALB )
  • When the app is deployed from BIG-IQ, we will specify a VS IP that will be 0.0.0.0. This is because ELB can only send traffic to the first nic of an instance and therefore we will deploy 1nic VE in Azure. So traffic and everything will be sent to the nic Self IP.
  • This config will be configured on all SSG VEs. They will have an identical Setup

In this lab, we will create a Service Scaling Group in an Azure environment.