Its been almost a year at HP and I have some mixed feelings about it. The job is fine and I have been re-orged into a role where I dole out tasks to developers and do some development myself. I am ok with that and it will be a different challenge for me, but I am hitting some roadblocks in developing new software that is really needed. There seems to be huge resistance to automation and starting from scratch. Currently using what we use now is very cumbersome and painful and we could be helped with a more streamlined process and set of tools. Hopefully I will have better luck after I put together requirements.
New Year New Job
On December 17th, it was my last day at my old job. I have left there and it’s diversity to focus more on networking and working with F5 load balancers. I personally feel that the F5s are the best load balancers in the business, especially when compared to things like the Cisco ACE, Coyote, or even the Citrix NetScaler. Part of my bias may be because I haved used the F5s in all sorts of configurations and rather extensively in the past few years. The iRule engine is very powerful, and the core of the F5 is linux. I will most likely continue to create software around the F5s, though there doesn’t seem to be much need for it where I am working.
F5 however did release a virtual machine load balancer that runs within VMWare. With some tweaking, it will also run inside Virtual Box. I will have to use the virtual machine version to test my code against as I don’t have access to load balancers that would be available to me to use to break my code with.