F5 has expanded its plans to use AI technology to bring simplicity to enterprise security and application operations. Its new, centralized AI Assistant brings together a number of agents under a single natural-language interface for services across its recently updated Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP). In addition, the AI Assistant features a new iRules code generation service that promises to help F5’s customers more easily customize network and application traffic handling.
ADSP combines F5’s load balancing, traffic management, and application and API security technologies, including BIG-IP, NGINX One, and Distributed Cloud Services, into a single platform that’s aimed at reducing complexity and simplifying operations. BIG-IP is F5’s family of hardware and software products designed to help enterprises manage network traffic and application delivery.
“The AI Assistant is really a set of services that unify several assistants we had into a common AI system that will help reduce operational complexity and toil for our users. For example, [it] will let them figure out the next steps for a certain security incident, maybe a web application attack, by quickly explaining the alert and what steps to take next to remediate the problem,” said Chris Ford, vice president of product management within F5’s AI Center of Excellence.
The AI Assistant can also reduce documentation searches and help accelerate the handling of routine tasks, such as developing traffic configurations and deploying APIs, Ford said. In addition, it can help customers optimize traffic management and app delivery flows by offering real-time AI contextual analytics that can be applied enterprise-wide, he said.
Meanwhile, F5’s iRules scripting language, which has been a component of BIG-IP configuration capabilities for years, has been enhanced with AI capabilities and implemented as part of the new ADSP SaaS delivery console.
“Now, customers can describe to the iRules code generation program what it is they want to do, and it can generate code in a matter of seconds that might take even experienced coders hours or days, even, depending on the requirement,” Ford said. “iRules can be very complicated, so what we’re really doing is reducing the time it takes to implement new policy in BIG-IP enterprises and reducing the complexity that it takes to do that.”
Customers would have had to do this manually in the past, testing code to make sure it didn’t mess up their BIG-IP environment, he said. Now, the code generation program can work with the AI Assistant to check the output of the code and make sure that it can run properly on BIG-IP at the same time, which saves customers a lot of time, Ford said.
The AI Assistant and iRules code generation service are part of a strategic move to help customers gain more proactive automation, Ford said, such as “detecting threats, detecting application performance issues, and then automatically generating iRules or similar policy or configurations customers.”
Source:: Network World