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The IT department employs a number of F5 iRules to customize the interception, inspection, transformation, and direction of inbound and outbound application traffic. For example, the team put an iRule in place that empowers BIG-IP APM to grant different levels of access to an internal SharePoint resource based on the URL a user is requesting access from. “This allows us to differentiate between internal users and contractors or vendors requesting access,” says Innocenzi.

iRules is a highly customized, Tcl-based scripting language allowing you complete programmatic access to application traffic in real time. If you’re looking to inspect, analyze, modify, route, re-direct, discard, or manipulate traffic in any way, chances are you can do it with an iRule. They even give you the ability to write business logic into your network layer.

To help you better understand iRules, think of virtual bandaids of code that provide immediate protection against any malicious threats in a network. Similar to Heartbleed, iRules was able to respond in real-time to prevent the attack from hitting the network until the vulnerability was patched.