Network infrastructure, scalability, and connectivity are still critical foundations for an AI future—and Kubernetes performance is a key metric for success. The seismic and rapid integration of AI tools, agents, and capabilities into nearly every industry has forced enterprises, organizations. and communications services providers (or telcos) to rush to prepare for this AI-impacted future, whether they are ready or not.
“F5 BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes saves network Kubernetes managers time because it now includes F5 Lifecycle Operator (FLO) to automate the lifecycle management within a cluster—including the installation, upgrade, and uninstallation.”
Some companies are at the forefront for readiness and are already invested for the cloud-native, high-performance, high-volume, and rapidly-evolving challenges. However, most organizations are still learning and evaluating this new frontier to rapidly decide where they should focus to be agile yet resilient, improve capacity while maintaining a strong security posture, and invest wisely without overcommitting to new models and establish some ROI for an unpredictable future.
Upgrade network performance today for your AI network tomorrow
For a resilient baseline, regardless of your current hybrid or multicloud architecture, F5 recommends evaluating and upgrading your network infrastructure to maximize Kubernetes performance. (A reminder: Kubernetes was not designed for all the high-volume data traffic, functionality, and protocols being put on it, so still requires optimization in cloud environments.)
Next-level goals are to strengthen, secure, and prepare for the incremental new cloud-native/Kubernetes challenges, which are critical for any new AI infrastructure. F5’s decades of experience load balancing and years of securing high-volume cloud data for telcos led to us to develop our hardworking F5 BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes software.
BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes offers a centralized control point designed to optimize both container ingress and egress, which delivers unprecedented scalability—and container and Kubernetes security needed to deploy and manage AI workloads at scale. As evidence, F5’s Kubernetes solution currently supports nearly 150 million 4G/5G subscribers on a Tier 1 network. And now through our partnership with AWS, BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes will soon be available on the AWS Marketplace to accelerate AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) for both Kubernetes and AI workloads.
Why include BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes in your AWS EKS stack
Depending on where you are in your journey to solidify your current foundation or extend your capacity for an AI network, here are some benefits for including BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes into your AI infrastructure:
- Significant performance optimization: BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes 2.1 saves network Kubernetes managers time because it now includes F5 Lifecycle Operator (FLO) to automate the lifecycle management within a cluster—including the installation, upgrade, and uninstallation. Pods, services, and network configurations are provisioned, updated, scaled, and monitored based on the desired state.
- Enhanced performance tier for existing clusters: BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes-enabled ARM node groups can be integrated into existing clusters to deliver high-performance capabilities without disrupting current workloads. This can include new AWS Graviton-enhanced nodes.
- Fast failover for high availability: Combining BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes with AWS Route Server endpoints enables the use of Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) to enable sub-second failover for mission-critical AI workloads. Additional intelligent health checks occur every 50 milliseconds, with route updates converging in less than one second, ensuring zero downtime for stateless AI workloads.
- Improved business value through consolidation and cost optimization: Enables infrastructure consolidation by replacing multiple load balancers with a single unified platform, reducing infrastructure components by up to 60%. Additionally, AWS Graviton-based instances offer up to 20% lower costs compared to x86-based EC2 instances, with potential overall savings of up to 45% on instances alone.
- New AI-driven observability that transforms data into intelligence: BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes enables comprehensive telemetry aggregation for all pipelines and workflows, providing protocol-level metrics, application telemetry, and infrastructure health data. Its aggregation point empowers multi-agent orchestration, holistic decision making, faster correlation, and more comprehensive automated responses, improving operational intelligence across all AI/ML protocols.
F5 BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes on AWS EKS provides more than infrastructure consolidation
F5 BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes optimizes the Kubernetes performance needed to enable intelligent, AI-driven operations for ongoing cost and performance optimization. As a result, organizations gain the operational efficiency and intelligence required for a sustained competitive advantage in AI/ML delivery. Among the benefits are:
- Unified platform: A single solution for diverse AI/ML protocol requirements.
- Economic efficiency: Significant cost reduction while improving performance.
- Intelligent operations: AI-driven insights for continuous improvement.
- Future-ready foundation: Scalable foundation for next-generation AI workloads.
If you’re planning to attend AWS re:Invent from December 1-5 in Las Vegas, come visit us in Booth #1325.
Look for the addition of F5 BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes to the AWS Marketplace in early 2026. In the meantime, you can also learn more by contacting an F5 representative or visiting our F5 BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes webpage.
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