Welcome! In today's digital landscape, bot defense is crucial for applications to prevent automated attacks that can lead to security breaches, data theft, and service disruptions, which ensures the integrity, availability, and reliability of online services. Taking this into account, in this course, we will learn how to protect our applications running on GCP using F5 BIG-IP and F5 Distributed Cloud Bot defense.

We'll add a security layer in front of the application using F5's BIG-IP virtual appliance in GCP. This will be configured with F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense Connector to mitigate Bot Attacks. We'll show you how to set up the Bot Defense Connector and deploy it to the BIG-IP virtual appliance. 

F5 Distributed Cloud or F5 XC is a comprehensive platform that combines cloud-native security, networking, and application services. This helps F5 XC deliver consistent and secure application experiences across multi-cloud and edge environments. It provides a unified approach to manage and protect applications, one of them is Bot Defense. F5 XC Bot Defense integrates advanced bot protection capabilities into the Cloud platform, enabling organizations to detect and mitigate malicious bot traffic effectively. And that's how it helps safeguarding the applications from automated threats and ensures seamless user experiences. Also, F5 BIG-IP Connector is a feature that allows seamless integration between the F5 XC bot defense solution with big IP.

We’ll learn both manual steps using the Cloud SaaS Console and automated steps using Terraform. By the end of this course, we'll know how to set up this security infrastructure to protect our applications deployed on our GKE cluster from bot traffic.