What is the purpose of floating self-IP addresses?

While self-IPs can be used for administrative access, the primary purpose of *floating* self-IPs is to provide a resilient routing target for data plane traffic, not exclusively for administrative access to either system.

Floating self-IPs allow either system to *receive* communication when it becomes active, but their core purpose is not about initiating communication from either system.

Floating self-IP addresses are designed to move between active and standby BIG-IP devices in a high-availability configuration. This allows upstream routers and other network devices to consistently route traffic to a single IP address, ensuring that client connections are always directed to the currently active BIG-IP system.

Floating self-IPs actually consolidate routing to a single address, which limits routing flexibility from the perspective of external devices to a single path rather than offering more choices.