F5 AppWorld 2025: Day #2 keynote & live show report

AI assistant for NGINX One

Following the release last year of the AI assistant for Distributed Cloud Services, F5 is bringing this capability to NGINX One.

The tool is powered by the F5 AI Data Fabric and serves as an intelligent partner to stretched NetOps, SecOps, DevOps and platform ops teams. The AI assistant for NGINX One uses a natural language interface to streamline operations and improve ROI by helping teams configure and optimise application delivery, preemptively address threats and identify anomalies before they impact production.  

Later this year, F5 will also release the AI assistant for BIG-IP to bring a new level of automation and intelligence to iRules. Customers will be able to automate the creation, maintenance, and optimisation of iRules while reducing the time and resources required to manage traffic and securely deliver apps.

Through its AI functions, the system generates optimised, validated iRules that adhere to best practices. This improves accuracy while reducing errors, ensuring a reliable and consistent experience for organisations. 

VELOS

F5 is also adding new additions to its VELOS product line, giving service providers and large enterprises a unified and customisable solution to optimise data-intensive workloads of AI and other modern apps. 

The new VELOS CX1610 chassis and BX520 400 Gbps performance blade scales to multi-terabits of throughput, suitable for the highest performance NEBS-compliance standards and supporting the most demanding 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) service.

“Service providers and large enterprises are experiencing increased requirements from emerging AI applications, broadband subscriber traffic, and overall application demands, leading to a critical need for increased bandwidth, low latency, and advanced application networking and security capabilities,” said Paul Nicholson, research VP, cloud and datacentre networks, IDC. “Performance and flexibility in the datacenter are of strategic importance to enhanced user and emerging AI-based services, while delivering key resilience and fault tolerance to meet business objectives.”

The VELOS product line provides optimized data packet routing, granular security, load balancing, and low latency, enabling the data ingest and real-time data needs that AI solutions require.

To infinity and beyond…

To fuel F5 AppWorld 2025 attendees with some gung-ho inspirational thoughts for the final day of the show, the company hosted Captain Scott Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and retired US navy captain to deliver his “Failure Is An Option” speech.

“I worked day and night when I was a NASA newbie as I was determined not to ever fail,” said Kelly. “After two years [one day] I was in the space shuttle simulator handling an emergency training scenario… and I was supremely confident (almost Tom Cruise Maverick confident) because I had practiced launch procedure procedures so extensively. But I made a huge failure and I tried to explain my way out of it… but it became clear to me that I would not make any positive impression on the cheif astronaut that way – he told me that we’re here to make mistakes and if we don’t, we don’t learn anything.”

The parallel for F5 attendees should of course be obvious, as a platform dedicated to load balancing with a key angle on system security and wider data management controls, the NASA control centre for F5 is the company’s Application Delivery and Security Platform.

As we have noted here, this is an Application Delivery Controller (ADC) offering that fully converges high-performance load balancing and traffic management with advanced app and API security capabilities into a single platform for the era of ADC 3.0 to serve the requirements of modern apps.

Wormke: Trust is paramount

Following Kelly, F5 got back to its core platform story and welcomed Shawn Wormke to the stage in his role as VP and general manager at NGINX.

Wormke explained how fast things are changing right now in technology and, specifically, he noted the impact of AI on the “ball of fire” i.e. the concept that F5 uses to explain the maelstrom of converging technologies, form factors and user endpoints.

“So often, it all comes down to trust,” said Wormke. “We know that 95% of users today are comfortably with using AI inside love operational systems, but AI is non-deterministic (and is very confident in its answers even when they are wrong) and so F5 is working very hard to make sure we have the controls in place to deal with all these realities. When we consider the amount of data ingestion that needs to happen (and data pipelines need to be optimised as part of this process), organisations will find that silo’d datasets mean data becomes fragmented – and insecure connectivity between datasets means organisations risk impacting their compliance status – so the secure landscape for companies today is one where the attack surface is expanding, so malicious actors are being given more opportunities to get in through blind spots (caused by unprotected APIs, shadows AI and more) mean that we need new ways to provide that much needed trust for firms today.”

Rounding out these keynote sessions, F5 AppWorld attendees heard from Maggie Stringfellow in her capacity as VP & GM for BIG-IP.

In a product keynote session entitled “Modernizing Application Delivery For The New Era”, Stringfellow explained that in today’s multi-cloud world, where the number of applications is forecast to grow by over 150 million by 2029, application delivery is becoming increasingly complex.

“Rising user expectations, fragmented infrastructures, hybrid app constructs and limited visibility are pushing you and your operations teams to the limit. F5 is actively transforming app delivery for the next era of apps and IT operations teams,” noted Stringfellow.

Now really presenting its conference schedule in a post-pandemic fully-blown way, F5 is clearly keen to explain just how broad its platform is now with its list of quite recently acquired new company elements and its substantial platform evolution. The ADC age has now entered its 3.0 iteration, era and age… and F5 insists that none of its competitors provide network security and management technologies at the holistic level that the company now does.

Astronaut Kelly: Let me tell you about embracing failure (but allow me to mention all the amazing stuff about me first).

Maggie Stringfellow, VP & GM for BIG-IP.

Shawn Wormke, VP and general manager at NGINX: Trust governs our lives… and it governs our stance with the new and emerging world of AI tools and services.

Pascal Royale, director of customer marketing and emcee of F5 AppWorld 2025.