Friday September 30, 2022
Stylebooks
I am back, it’s day 5!
I know what you are thinking, I need to deploy an application. However, my skilled NetScaler guy is out on a beach somewhere catching some rays ( I am talking about you Terry!).How can a three-year-old get the system set up like a pro when I know so very little about this networking stuff?
Obviously, watching Nick Jr has not prepared me for this scenario.
What I need is some help!
You have been selected for a training course in Citrix ADM, the goal is to provide you with enough information to be actually dangerous when talking to a customer or client. 30 days is a bit of an arbitrary number, but I am prepared to give you 2minutes of material, can I get 2 minutes of your time? I have talked about Fleet management, general analytics, security analytics and AI / ML.
Today is all about Stylebooks.
Honestly, what are you talking about?
The Stylebook is to offer a less skilled application owner a helping hand in getting his application front end configured on the NetScaler. It can do other things too, which could be handy in modern infrastructure deployments.
So what? What problem does it solve?
I’m glad you asked!
Picture the scene, you need to deploy a set-up to a lot of NetScaler appliances, we will assume that you have ten pairs to get updated with the load balancing setup. We will also assume that ADM has been set up to manage all these appliances (of course!).
Option 1.You create a script, that you modify for each HA pair.
You do the deployment and everything looks good. You then get a call and they want the configuration in Manilla updated for a new application server, so you log in and revise that one box. You then get told that half the appliances you were given are wrong and you now need to change them.
If you could give me the right info to start with …..
Now, you could run a configuration job from ADM, but there is a Stylebook for your scenario, what could it offer?
Option 2 You choose to deploy the same configuration with a Stylebook, using the limited GUI you select the application servers you need. ADM does a dry run and says it will all be good. The configuration is blasted across your appliances and an Application specific config Pack is created for your application. Any updates can now be made centrally.
Some really cool options
· At some point in the future, the application is retired. You go into ADM and delete the config Pack. It then removes those application settings from your appliances. Hotel California syndrome, where config never leaves is fixed! Your infrastructure then will never hold dead configuration that may have security issues.
· Cloud migration? No problem, just update the target appliance list in the config pack and your application just moved to AWS! (other cloud platforms are available)
· Want to use Ansible but still want to use Stylebooks? Sure, you can call the Stylebook from the ADM API.
Something else. When Stylebooks came out, it did require a green field setup, so the appliance needed to be set up with Stylebooks before doing anything else. That isn’t the case now, ADM can create the Stylebook from an existing appliance. Therefore the brown field deployment can be revised to make use of the capabilities above.
Summary.
There is a lot more to Stylebooks than I have covered here, ultimately it’s another killer feature that you have likely never heard of!
BTW, this capability is free.
What’s not to like?