F5 redefines ADC in the AI ​​era

F5 recently explained how the application delivery controller (ADC) can be transformed to meet the massive demands of modern and artificial intelligence (AI) driven application scenarios. F5 provides flexible product forms , management capabilities, and advanced control covering all aspects of application security and application delivery through a platform approach, leading the industry development and promoting the next generation of ADC innovation.

“The rise of AI and modern applications requires a fundamental rethinking of application security and application delivery. Traditional approaches are no longer able to manage today’s complex and distributed systems. Enterprises need solutions that provide consistency, flexibility, and comprehensive visibility across their entire IT environment,” said Kunal Anand, Chief Innovation Officer at F5. “F5 has been able to help customers address these challenges and securely deliver advanced digital experiences through a comprehensive upgrade of its technology portfolio.”

According to the Application Strategy Status Report released by F5 , the era of AI-driven modern applications has arrived. 75% of enterprises said that they have deployed AI applications to some extent. However, although enterprises are accelerating the implementation of modern digital experience, they still face severe challenges in ensuring and delivering AI applications. These applications need to process massive amounts of data, involve complex traffic patterns, and introduce more advanced security threats, and the current security capabilities of enterprises are not yet fully matched.

The current technical architecture that relies on traditional ADCs is in urgent need of innovation. The new generation of ADCs must adapt to the reality of today's hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments, integrating the originally scattered single solutions to meet key requirements such as high-performance load balancing, comprehensive Web application and API security protection, multi-cloud network connectivity, and AI gateway capabilities.

To this end, F5 is leading this transformation by launching a series of architectures designed for today's dynamic AI scenarios to protect and deliver modern applications in a new way. These new resources will help enterprises accelerate AI planning and deployment while addressing the increasingly complex challenges of modern application delivery.

ADC 3.0: Redefining ADC in the AI ​​Era

Over the past 25 years, IT infrastructure, applications, and security protection have undergone profound changes, from local data centers and monolithic applications that rely on basic rule-based WAF and DoS protection to microservices and container-based applications deployed in public clouds, and the introduction of more comprehensive security mechanisms covering API protection and automated attack defense. Today, with the advent of the AI ​​era, hybrid and multi-cloud environments have become the norm, and application architectures are highly distributed. Enterprises urgently need AI-driven security capabilities to defend against increasingly complex threats.

In an era of unprecedented technological complexity and security challenges, F5's new definition of ADC is critical for enterprises that want to adapt to change. AI and other modern applications urgently need new advanced ADC solutions that deeply integrate high-performance load balancing with more powerful web application and API security capabilities to support the next generation of digital experiences. As a pioneer in the ADC field, F5 has been leading the application security and application delivery of large global enterprises for nearly 30 years. Today, F5 is helping customers cope with the complexity challenges in the deployment of AI applications, and will continue to lead the industry with a new ADC technology vision.

"Applications are becoming more dynamic and distributed, a trend that will continue as AI becomes more prevalent in the enterprise," said Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research. "As the nature of applications changes, ADCs will need to evolve as well. At the same time, the need for robust load balancing and application delivery technologies combined with security capabilities to protect application and API-level data is critical in the AI ​​era. F5 is a leader in this space, and its vision is aligned with the demanding delivery and security requirements of the AI ​​era."

Building secure AI applications

The accelerated development of AI has brought unprecedented application security and application delivery challenges to enterprise IT and security teams, which are already struggling with the complexity of hybrid and multi-cloud environments. AI applications make larger and more frequent requests to enterprise data stores and AI models, which are often deployed in AI factories . Therefore, enterprises need advanced technologies with high-performance load balancing to handle large-scale data and complex traffic patterns without causing delays. At the same time, with the rise of generative AI, new security threats such as model theft, data poisoning attacks, and prompt injection are also surging, and attackers are trying to infiltrate and hijack AI models and their training data.

To help enterprises meet these challenges, F5 launched a new AI reference architecture , which aims to organize AI/ML workflows into seven core modules and provide best practices for security, application traffic management, and platform optimization. This architecture also covers the top ten application delivery challenges listed by F5, the top ten security risks of the OWASP Large Language Model (LLM), and various deployment models. Through these architectures, customers can efficiently match business and technical needs with AI projects.

F5's AI reference architecture can help customers build a secure and highly scalable IT infrastructure to meet the needs of AI applications, thereby reducing risks, costs, and the need for internal design work. In addition, F5 has integrated seven AI modules across hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments and announced partnerships with several companies to support customers' AI projects:

calculate

F5 is equipped with NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU to accelerate AI application delivery

F5 and Intel collaborate to simplify AI service security and delivery

Data and storage

F5 and NetApp work together to accelerate and simplify AI deployment of large language models

MinIO and F5 join forces to enhance AI workloads with high-performance object storage and distributed application services

LLM Security and Observability

Prompt Security AI firewall is launched on F5 distributed cloud platform to protect generative AI application interactions

F5 Distributed Cloud Services now supports AIShield GuArdIan to protect generative AI applications and LLM security

Portkey and F5 work together to create intelligent AI application delivery

Cloud Service Providers

OVHcloud and F5 jointly create advanced multi-cloud application security