F5 Inc. said today its customers can now use advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to simplify the integration of new AI applications in their corporate networks.

With its new offering, called F5 AI Gateway, the company says, it can streamline the interactions between various components of AI systems, such as the applications, application programming interfaces and large language models.

F5 explained that the AI Gateway is a containerized service that’s designed to automate the way network components interact, in order to boost performance, enable superior visibility and better protect against security threats. The result will be improved data output quality, making it easier for companies to integrate generative AI services and applications into their information technology infrastructures, the company added.

According to F5, networking challenges create a big obstacle for AI deployments. The problem stems from the way that AI services are delivered and consumed primarily by APIs. The increased API traffic causes major headaches, as teams struggle to scale their networks to handle it.

Moreover, AI also causes complications in terms of network monitoring. F5 said that in order to run AI applications efficiently, companies must closely monitor metrics such as graphics processing unit compute costs and system responsiveness. But doing this can be challenging within existing network architectures.

To monitor AI systems effectively, networks must be able to handle optimized request, response and promote interactions across the entire data ecosystem. This is where F5 AI Gateway comes in, observing, optimizing and securing vast numbers of users and automated variables to achieve cost reductions, mitigate security risks and ensure regulatory compliance.

Network optimization is achieved by offloading duplicate tasks from LLMs with semantic caching to reduce operations costs. In addition, F5 AI Gateway automates the integration of AI apps and their APIs within the network, abstracting away the complexities to ensure optimal load balancing, traffic routing and rate limiting. By doing this, the network becomes better able to maintain service availability and provide maximum performance.

Additionally, the company said, the AI Gateway enforces security and compliance policies with automated detection and remediation against risks identified in the Open Web Application Security Project’s list of top 10 risks for LLMs.

F5 said the AI Gateway can be deployed on any cloud platform or in any on-premises data center, natively integrating with its NGINX and BIG-IP platforms, so it can leverage its traditional network security and application delivery services. Customers will also have the flexibility to develop, customize and enforce their own programmable security controls, with the ability to update and apply these dynamically.

International Data Corp. analyst Shari Lava said F5’s AI Gateway is a compelling offering, because virtually every business will be running AI applications in the coming years, so it’s crucial they implement a network architecture that can support them.

“F5’s introduction of an AI gateway to its application stack of services gives its customers greater flexibility in how they build their AI application structures, with enhanced protection and model optimization,” she said.

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