F5 Distributed Cloud Hybrid Security Architecture Deployments

Overview

Examples of hybrid security deployments utilizing F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP in conjunction with the F5 product portfolio. For more information on the project, please see the following article series F5 Hybrid Security Architectures: One WAF Engine, Total Flexibility

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• F5 Distributed Cloud Account (F5XC)
  • F5XC API certificate
  • User Domain delegated
• NGINX Plus with App Protect and Ingress license
• AWS Account - Due to the assets being created, free tier will not work.
  • The F5 BIG-IP AMI being used from the AWS Marketplace must be subscribed to your account
  • Please make sure resources like VPC and Elastic IP's are below the threshold limit in that aws region
• Terraform Cloud Account
• GitHub Account

Assets

• xc: F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP
• nap: NGINX Ingress Controller for Kubernetes with NGINX App Protect (WAF and API Protection)
• bigip-base: F5 BIG-IP Base
• bigip-awaf: F5 BIG-IP Advanced WAF
• bigip-cis: F5 Big-IP Container Ingress Services
• infra: AWS Infrastructure (VPC, IGW, etc.)
• eks: AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service
• brewz: Brews Microservice
• arcadia: Arcadia Finance test web application and API
• juiceshop: OWASP Juice Shop test web application

Tools

• Cloud Provider: AWS
• IAC: Terraform
• IAC State: Terraform Cloud
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions

Terraform Cloud

• Workspaces: Create a CLI or API workspace for each asset in the workflow chosen. Check your work-flow article for more details

  Workflow	Assets/Workspaces
  xc-bigip	infra, bigip-base, bigip-awaf, juiceshop, xc
  xc-nap	infra, eks, nap, arcadia, xc
  xc-nic-api	infra, eks, nic, brewz, xc
  xc-bigip+bot	infra, bigip-base, bigip-awaf, juiceshop, xc
  xcbn-cis	infra, bigip-base, bigip-cis, eks, nic, brewz, xc

• Workspace Sharing: Under the settings for each Workspace, set the Remote state sharing to share with each Workspace created.

• Variable Set: Create a Variable Set with the following values:

  Name	Type	Description
  AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID	Environment	Your AWS Access Key ID
  AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY	Environment	Your AWS Secret Access Key
  AWS_SESSION_TOKEN	Environment	Your AWS Session Token
  NGINX_JWT	Environment	Your NGINX JSON Web Token value associated with your NGINX license.
  VOLT_API_P12_FILE	Environment	Your F5XC API certificate. Set this to api.p12
  VES_P12_PASSWORD	Environment	Set this to the password you supplied when creating your F5 XC API certificate
  ssh_key	Terraform	Your ssh key for accessing the created BIG-IP and compute assets
  admin_src_addr	Terraform	The source address and subnet in CIDR format of your administrative workstation
  tf_cloud_organization	Terraform	Your Terraform Cloud Organization name

GitHub

• Fork and Clone Repo. Navigate to Actions tab and enable it.

• Actions Secrets: Create the following GitHub Actions secrets in your forked repo

  • P12: The linux base64 encoded F5XC API certificate
  • TF_API_TOKEN: Your Terraform Cloud API token
  • TF_CLOUD_ORGANIZATION: Your Terraform Cloud Organization name
  • TF_CLOUD_WORKSPACE_<Workspace Name>: Create for each workspace in your workflow
    • EX: TF_CLOUD_WORKSPACE_BIGIP_BASE would be created with the value bigip-base

Workflow Runs

STEP 1: Check out a branch for the workflow you wish to run using the following naming convention.

DEPLOY

Workflow	Branch Name
xc-bigip	deploy-xc-bigip
xc-nap	deploy-xc-nap
xcapi-nic	deploy-xcapi-nic
xc-bigip+bot	deploy-xc-bigip
xcbn-cis	deploy-xcbn-cis

DESTROY

Workflow	Branch Name
xc-bigip	destroy-xc-bigip
xc-nap	destroy-xc-nap
xcapi-nic	destroy-xcapi-nic
xc-bigip+bot	destroy-xc-bigip
xcbn-cis	destroy-xcbn-cis

STEP 2: Rename infra/terraform.tfvars.examples to infra/terraform.tfvars and add the following data:

• project_prefix = "Your project identifier name in lower case letters only - this will be applied as a prefix to all assets"
• resource_owner = "Your-name"
• aws_region = "AWS Region" ex. us-east-1
• azs = ["us-east-1a", "us-east1b"] - Change to Correct Availability Zones based on selected Region
• Also update assets boolean value as per your work-flows

STEP 3: Depending on your work-flow, rename and update related .tfvars. For example in xc-bigip work-flow, update bigip/terraform.tfvars.examples to bigip/terraform.tfvars and add the following data:

• f5_ami_search_name = "F5 BIGIP-16.1.3* PAYG-Adv WAF Plus 25Mbps*" - You must be subscribed to the AMI in the AWS Marketplace
• aws_secretmanager_auth = false
• create_awaf_config = true
• awaf_config_payload = "awaf-config.json"

Step 3: Rename xc/terraform.tfvars.examples to xc/terraform.tfvars and add the following data:

• api_url = "Your F5XC tenant"
• xc_tenant = "Your tenant id available in F5 XC Administration section Tenant Overview menu"
• xc_namespace = "The existing XC namespace where you want to deploy resources"
• app_domain = "the FQDN of your app (cert will be autogenerated)"
• xc_waf_blocking = "Set to true to enable blocking"
• Also update assets boolean value as per your work-flow based on the values in the tfvars example.

STEP 5: Commit and push your build branch to your forked repo

• Build will run and can be monitored in the GitHub Actions tab and TF Cloud console

STEP 6: Once the pipeline completes, verify your assets were deployed or destroyed based on your workflow. From F5 XC console, you can check if the F5 XC load balancer has come to active. NOTE: The autocert process takes time. It may be 5 to 10 minutes before Let's Encrypt has provided the cert.

Development

Outline any requirements to setup a development environment if someone would like to contribute. You may also link to another file for this information.

Support

For support, please open a GitHub issue. Note, the code in this repository is community supported and is not supported by F5 Networks.

Community Code of Conduct

Please refer to the F5 DevCentral Community Code of Conduct.

License

Apache License 2.0

Copyright

Copyright 2014-2020 F5 Networks Inc.

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