F5 Collaborates with Intel to Simplify the Security and Delivery of AI Services
August 2024 by Marc Jacob
F5 announced it is bringing application security and delivery capabilities to AI deployments powered by Intel. This new joint solution combines industry security and traffic management from F5’s NGINX Plus offering with the cutting-edge optimization and performance of the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit and Infrastructure Processing Units (IPUs) to deliver superior protection, scalability, and performance for advanced AI inference.
As organizations increasingly adopt AI to power intelligent applications and workflows, efficient and secure AI inference becomes critical. This need is addressed by combining the OpenVINO toolkit—which optimizes and accelerates AI model inference—with F5 NGINX Plus, providing robust traffic management and security.
The OpenVINO toolkit simplifies the optimization of models from almost any framework to enable a write-once, deploy-anywhere approach. This toolkit is essential for developers aiming to create scalable and efficient AI solutions with minimal code changes.
F5 NGINX Plus enhances the security and reliability of these AI models. Acting as a reverse proxy, NGINX Plus manages traffic, ensures high availability, and provides active health checks. It also facilitates SSL termination and mTLS encryption, safeguarding communications between applications and AI models without compromising performance.
To further boost performance, Intel IPUs offload infrastructure services from the host CPU, freeing up resources for AI model servers. The IPUs efficiently manage infrastructure tasks, opening up resources to enhance the scalability and performance of both NGINX Plus and OpenVINO™ Model Servers (OVMS).
This integrated solution is particularly beneficial for edge applications, such as video analytics and IoT, where low latency and high performance are crucial. By running NGINX Plus on the Intel IPU, the solution helps ensure rapid and reliable responses, making it ideal for content delivery networks and distributed microservices deployments.
– The solution is now available.