F5 unveils AI Assistant to automate iRules & simplify app security
The company has integrated a unified natural language interface across its offerings, including F5 BIG-IP, NGINX One, and Distributed Cloud Services, giving operations teams what it describes as a simplified user experience for managing increasingly complex digital ecosystems. With the new AI Assistant, teams can utilise natural language prompts to generate, explain and customise iRules code for specific environments, aiming to minimise manual intervention and enhance operational efficiency.
In recent years, organisations have faced mounting pressure to simplify and automate workflows as they scale application deployments across distributed infrastructure and adopt AI solutions for digital transformation. F5's move seeks to address these challenges by embedding automation and programmability within application delivery and security processes. "The programmability of iRules has long proved essential for customers and served as a compelling differentiator," said Kunal Anand, Chief Innovation Officer at F5. "What we're doing now is making that power instantaneous. With AI Assistant and iRules code generation, any operator can use natural language to generate or explain iRules on the fly. This means they can adapt to application changes or security events with far greater speed and efficiency, ensuring the policy that protects their infrastructure can evolve as fast as their business does."
The F5 AI Assistant is designed to support XOps teams - including DevOps, SecOps, NetOps, Platform Ops, and CISOs - by introducing real-time, domain-specific intelligence directly into their operational tools. According to the company, the assistant provides actionable guidance to reduce documentation searches for DevOps, prioritise risks for SecOps, optimise traffic management for NetOps, drive consistency for Platform Ops, and support CISOs in application vulnerability assessments.
One key feature is the AI Assistant's iRules code generation capability. F5 iRules are dynamic scripts used by more than 85% of F5 BIG-IP customers for traffic management, routing optimisation and security enhancements. Automating iRules creation through a natural language interface aims to address what F5 identifies as a significant need for precision and efficiency, especially as dynamic application environments grow in scale and complexity.
The AI Assistant also helps teams understand how generated and manual iRules are performing by explaining components, logic and overall functionality. This approach is intended to minimise configuration errors while enabling teams to make quicker, more informed IT decisions.
F5 has indicated ongoing investments in agentic AI within its Application Delivery and Security Platform, targeting the empowerment of XOps teams through tools supporting autonomous decision-making, enhanced threat intelligence and security analytics. The company says these advances are supported by its AI Data Fabric, which enables rapid labelling of datasets and the training of specialised models.
According to F5, customers can see benefits such as faster deployment times, improved security postures, and less downtime for mission-critical systems. By automating operational tasks, organisations may be able to refocus staff attention on business priorities like feature development and customer experience improvements. The claimed operational enhancements promoted by the F5 AI Assistant include speed, accuracy, efficiency and scalability for distributed applications across private and multicloud infrastructure.
F5's approach relies on proprietary data and expertise accumulated from its application delivery and security engineering. This is intended to ensure the outputs are secure, validated, and tuned to real-world customer requirements, compared to more generic tools. "F5 iRules have long been recognized as the industry's most powerful and flexible solution for complex application requirements, delivering unmatched low-level control not available on other platforms," said T.J. Vreugdenhil, Sr. Solutions Architect at SHI. "Traditionally, building and maintaining iRules required significant expertise. F5 AI Assistant dramatically reduces this complexity, empowering organizations to retain deep control while streamlining rule creation and management. By leveraging 'F5-validated' trained data, it produces outputs engineers can trust - boosting confidence and accelerating innovation. Importantly, F5 AI Assistant also ensures sensitive iRules data remains secure, never exposed to third-party or external AI tools."
The F5 AI Assistant with iRules code generation functionality is now available for customers managing application delivery and security across modern IT environments.
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