F5 launches AI Gateway for secure AI app deployment

F5 has announced the early access launch of its F5 AI Gateway, a solution designed to support the deployment and scaling of AI-powered applications.

The F5 AI Gateway aims to address the challenges firms encounter when integrating AI capabilities within their framework, especially during the initial development phases of large language models (LLMs). The rapidly evolving landscape requires solutions that provide oversight and defence against new forms of threats.

"LLMs are unlocking new levels of productivity and enhanced user experiences for customers, but they also require oversight, deep inspection at inference-time, and defence against new types of threats," said Kunal Anand, Chief Innovation Officer at F5. "By addressing these new requirements and integrating with F5's trusted solutions for API traffic management, we're enabling customers to confidently and efficiently deploy AI-powered applications in a massively larger threat landscape."

The F5 AI Gateway integrates seamlessly with the company's existing portfolio, which allows organisations to develop AI applications capable of handling increased demand without affecting performance. The solution aims to secure and manage both user and provider interactions through authentication and zero trust capabilities.

F5 highlights that its AI Gateway enhances security and compliance by automating the detection and remediation of risks identified in the OWASP Top Ten for LLM Applications. Additionally, it offloads repetitive tasks from LLMs, thus improving user experience and lowering operational costs.

Shari Lava, Senior Director of AI and Automation at IDC, commented on the release: "AI-powered applications will become a cornerstone for nearly every business and organisation in the coming years. F5's introduction of an AI Gateway to its application stack of services enables its customers to have greater flexibility in how they build their AI application structure, but still have enhanced protection and model optimisation."

The deployment flexibility of the AI Gateway is one of its key features, being suitable for use in any cloud or data centre environment. It also connects natively with F5's NGINX and BIG-IP platforms, benefiting from F5's app security and delivery services across traditional, multicloud, or edge deployments.

The modularity of the solution allows organisations to create customisable security and control measures, which can be updated dynamically to meet ongoing security policies and compliance requirements.

"F5's AI Gateway is an integral part of our AI strategy," said Austin Geraci, CTO of WorldTech IT. "With this technology, our customers are able to develop both internal and external-facing AI applications capable of handling a surge in queries without degradation to site and application performance. F5 brings leading app security and delivery capabilities to accelerate AI experiences at scale. With F5 AI Gateway, semantic caching and intelligent traffic routing alone represent significant cost savings, and the unification of F5 services will save customers hundreds of hours of integration work."

The solution also simplifies AI model interaction by providing a single API interface for accessing various AI models, enhancing load balancing, traffic routing, and rate limiting for local and third-party language models while maintaining service availability and performance.