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 this multi-part lab. Lab attendees should have received an invitation (which requests you update your password for access) email to the lab environment. Please check the email address used for course registration and its associated spam folders to see if the invitation email has been received. If you have not received an email, please contact a member of the lab team.

The F5 Distributed Cloud Console, where a majority of all lab tasks will be conducted, is a SaaS based control-plane for services which provides a GUI and API for managing network, security, and compute services. The F5 Distributed Cloud Console can manage “sites” in existing on-premises, private data centers and sites within AWS, Azure, and GCP public cloud environments.

Task 1: Lab Environment

The image below represents an overview of the lab environment. F5 Distributed Cloud Services will be configured as a SaaS Edge delivery and security service tier to a publicly hosted web application. The key elements lab attendees will interact with are as follows: F5 Distributed Cloud Console F5 Distributed Cloud Global Network / Application Delivery Network (ADN) Publicly hosted application (Public Cloud)

Task 2: F5 Distributed Cloud Console Login

The following will guide you through the initial Lab environment access within the F5 Distributed Cloud Console. You should have received an email with an invitation to access a F5 Distributed Cloud Tenant. The email will come from no-reply@volterramails.io.

The name of the F5 Distributed Cloud tenant that we will be using for this lab is f5-xc-lab-sec Additionally, the following are key configuration elements for this lab and will be used throughout the lab tasks that follow.

• F5 Distributed Cloud Console: https://f5-xc-lab-sec.console.ves.volterra.io/

• Delegated Domain: lab-sec.f5demos.com

After following the invitation email’s instructions to Update Password, proceed to the first step below to access the F5 Distributed Cloud Lab Tenant.

Please log into the F5 Distributed Cloud Lab Tenant with your user ID (email) & password. https://f5-xc-lab-sec.console.ves.volterra.io/ When you first login, accept the Lab tenant EULA. Click the check box and then click Accept and Agree. Select all work domain roles and click Next to see various configuration options. Roles can be changed any time later if desired. Click the Advanced skill level to expose more menu options and then click Get Started to begin. You can change this setting after logging in as well. Several Guidance ToolTips will appear, you can safely close these as they appear.

You can adjust your work domains and skill level (not required) by clicking on the Account icon in the top right of the screen and then clicking on Account Settings. In the resulting window you can observe the Work domains and skill level section and other administrative functions. Note For the purposes of this lab, permissions have been restricted to lab operations. As some menus will be locked and 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 has been provided a unique namespace which you will be defaulted to (in terms of GUI navigation) for all tasks performed through the course of this lab. Click on the Select Service in the left-hand navigation. In the resulting fly out navigation, click Web App & API Protection. In the Web App & API Protection configuration screen observe the URL. In the URI path, locate the <adjective-animal> namespace that you have been assigned. It will be located in the portion of the URI path between /namespaces/ and /overview/ as shown in this example …/namespaces/<namespace>/overview/…. Note the 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.

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