One of the goals for the project is to make it as easy as possible for our customers to get started using iControl (we’ve got it down to 3 lines of code). Not enough of our customers take advantage of iControl, and we felt Python’s gentle learning curve (it’s just plain fun to write Python code) and portability across platforms really filled a niche.

Python sports a killer “power shell”, some extremely robust and flexible web frameworks, GUI toolkits and many other options. In other words, with Python the sky is the limit and it’s within reach. What’s more, you can use pyControl with any of these options so our customers can solve problems their own unique way (hopefully they’ll share).

How did the project happen?

At the end of 2007, two F5 Field Engineers, Mohamed Lrhazi and Matt Cauthorn, were working on separate versions of a Python iControl API and didn’t know about each other’s work. The good folks at Dev Central got us synced up and we joined forces. Since then, we’ve finished off the first release, written sample code, and have done several well-received pre-release field demos to generate visibility within the F5 Field Engineer community. We’re optimistic that the future for pyControl is bright, both internally at F5 and with our customers.

What next?

More of everything – more tutorials, more screencasts, more sample code, more community involvement. Some other folks in the field have already taken to the project and are writing cool pyControl scripts as I write this. All of this will end up on DevCentral for the community at large, and hopefully we’ll get tons more as the project matures.