Introduction: Accessing F5 Distributed Cloud Console

Welcome to this F5 Distributed Cloud Lab. The following tasks will guide you through the initial access requirements for the associated lab environment. Lab attendees should have received an invitation email to the lab environment based on the submitted registration email. Please check email and spam folders if it has not been received. If you have not received an email, please contact a member of the lab team.

F5 Distributed Cloud Console, where this lab will be conducted, is a SaaS control-plane for services that provides a UI and API for managing network, security, and compute services. The F5 Distributed Cloud Console can manage “sites” in existing on-premises data centers and sites in AWS, Azure, and GCP cloud environments.

Course/Lab Invitation

Course/Lab Attendees will receive an email similar to the graphic displayed in this section. The email will come from courses@notify.udf.f5.com.

As attendees may be registered for several labs/courses, ensure the correctly identified course is selected. Use either the first or second link position (indicated by arrows) based on the attendee’s F5 UDF (Unified Demo Framework) Account Status.

1. New UDF Users

2. Returning UDF Users going directly to Course

Accessing UDF (F5 Unified Demo Framework)

The following will guide attendees through the initial Lab environment access within F5 UDF. Following the instructions from the Course/Lab invitation above, attendees will be prompted to login at https://udf.f5.com. Click Invited Users.

Note

The steps for new UDF Users or the steps for resetting UDF User account passwords are not shown. Please contact a member of the lab team if further assistance is needed.

Attendees are redirected to F5 Customer Identity. Enter your registration email address and click Continue, then enter your password and continue to sign in. If you are already signed in to F5 Customer Identity, this step is skipped.

Note

Depending on your account, you may be prompted to set up or complete multi-factor authentication (MFA). Follow the on-screen instructions.

If you used the course link from the invitation email, you are taken directly to the course Lobby. Otherwise, attendees will be presented their scheduled course sessions on the UDF dashboard. Locate the course/lab with the appropriate Date, Time and Name and then click LAUNCH.

From the course Lobby, click the Join button.

The Lab environment window will now be displayed on the Documentation tab. Click on the Deployment tab in the horizontal navigation links. Locate and observe the state of the Client system.

In approximately 5-7 minutes the associated yellow gear starting icon will change to a green arrow (running) icon and attendees will proceed to the next section of steps.

Note

Your specific lab environment may vary from the graphics shown below. The Client will, however, be consistent.

Accessing F5 Distributed Cloud

Following the state change of the Client System to a green arrow (running) icon, attendees will receive a second email. This email will come from no-reply@cloud.f5.com. Click Accept invitation within the email.

Note

This link should be accessed in the same browser session as UDF was accessed for a seamless experience.

Warning

Attendees should not attempt access to the F5 Distributed Cloud tenant prior to receiving the email. Lab permissions may need to be re-applied.

The tenant login page will be presented. Under If you are a user in this tenant:, click Sign In with oidc (do not use Log In as Tenant Owner).

Since you are already signed in to UDF with F5 Customer Identity, single sign-on (SSO) should log you in to the tenant automatically. If you are prompted to sign in, enter the same email address and password used for UDF.

The first time you log in, the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy will display; check the box and then click Accept and Agree.

Note

This screen is only shown on your first login. Guidance tooltips or notices may also appear; attendees can safely close them in order to begin the lab.

On first login, a What’s New in F5 Distributed Cloud window and an announcement banner at the top of the page may be displayed. Click Close on the What’s New window and Remind Me Later (or the X) on the banner.

Attendees will now be presented the Home page of the F5 Distributed Cloud Console (Welcome to Distributed Cloud) with the workspaces, features and services available.

Optionally, you can review your account preferences by clicking the Account icon in the top right of the screen and then clicking Account Settings. This opens Administration > Personal Management > My Account, where you can:

• Click Manage Notification Preferences to choose which events you are notified about.

• Under Advanced Configuration Fields Visibility, click Enable Auto-Expand Advanced to automatically expand all advanced configuration fields when creating a new object (for example, an HTTP Load Balancer).

Neither setting is required for this lab; the lab steps indicate when a section needs to be expanded.

Note

For the purposes of this lab, permissions have been restricted to lab operations, so some menus will be locked or not visible.

Namespaces, which provide an environment for isolating configured applications or enforcing role-based access controls, are leveraged within the F5 Distributed Cloud Console. For the purposes of this lab, each lab attendee is assigned a unique namespace when the lab is launched. This namespace will be used for all tasks performed through the course of this lab.

From the Home page, click the Web App & API Protection workspace tile. If you are already in another workspace, click Select Workspace at the top of the left-hand navigation and choose Web App & API Protection.

The workspace opens in a shared namespace (for example api-service-discovery), which is not your lab namespace. The selected namespace is shown at the top of the left-hand navigation, under the workspace name (labelled Namespace). Click it to open the namespace selector; under Application Namespaces, select your assigned <adjective-animal> namespace.

Note

Use the namespace with the <adjective-animal> name format, not system or api-service-discovery.

Your namespace is now displayed at the top of the left-hand navigation. It also appears in the browser URL, between /namespaces/ and the next path segment, for example …/namespaces/<your-namespace>/overview/…. Note this namespace as it will be used throughout the lab tasks that follow.

Note

Administratively, there are other ways to find namespaces. Due to access and permission restrictions for this particular lab, those menus are not available.

Preparation

Before starting the course, update your namespace to dynamically update the guide.

Note

You may have had a namespace from a previous lab, please update it with the new one.

Warning

Guide pages might need to be refreshed to get updated namespace to render.

Enter your namespace: Save

Current namespace: <namespace>

Note

Guide pages might need to be refreshed to get updated namespace to render.

Beginning of Lab: You are now ready to begin the lab, Enjoy! Ask questions as needed.