Episodios

  • Agentic APIs Have PTSD
    Sep 30 2025

    Your APIs were designed for humans and orderly machines: clean request, tidy response, stateless, rate-limited. Then along came agentic AI—recursive, stateful, jittery little things that retry forever, chain calls together, and dream up new query paths at 3 a.m.

    The result? Your APIs start looking less like infrastructure and more like trauma patients. Rate limits collapse. Monitoring floods. Security controls meant for human logins don’t make sense when the caller is a bot acting on its own intent.

    The punchline: enterprises aren’t serving users anymore, they’re serving swarms of other AIs. If you don’t rethink throttling, observability, and runtime policy, your endpoints are going to get steamrolled.

    Join host Lori MacVittie and F5 guest Connor Hicks to explore how enterprises can adapt and thrive—hit play now to future-proof your APIs!

    Read AI Agentic workflows and Enterprise APIs: Adapting API architectures for the age of AI agents: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17443

    Más Menos
    22 m
  • When Context Eats Your Architecture
    Sep 23 2025

    Anthropic lobbed a million-token grenade into the coding wars, and suddenly every AI startup with a “clever context management” pitch looks like it’s selling floppy disks in a cloud world. If your entire differentiator was “we chunk code better than the other guy,” congratulations—you’ve been chunked. This is what happens when the model itself shows up to the fight with a bigger backpack.

    But here’s the twist—this isn’t just about writing bigger code files without losing track of your variables. For enterprises, context size is an architectural shift. A million-token window means you can shove your entire compliance manual, last year’s customer interactions, and that dusty COBOL spec into one call—no brittle session stitching, no RAG duct tape. It collapses architectural complexity… and replaces it with new headaches: governance of massive payloads, cost blowouts if you treat tokens like they’re free, and rethinking model routing strategies. Context isn’t just memory anymore—it’s a first-class infrastructure decision.

    Press play to hear F5 hosts Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses, joined by special guest Vishal Murgai, unravel what's next for enterprise AI.

    Más Menos
    22 m
  • The DPU Awakening: Silicon Muscle for AI Mayhem
    Sep 16 2025

    This week on Pop Goes the Stack, we crack open the next frontier of enterprise infrastructure: DPUs (Data Processing Units). AI factories aren’t just stressing your network—they’re setting it on fire. With east-west traffic exploding and inference storms growing by the day, CPUs and legacy firewalls just can’t keep up. Enter the DPU: purpose-built to offload, secure, and accelerate the chaos.

    We break down:

    - Why AI workloads are crushing traditional networking and security architectures

    - How DPUs deliver line-rate telemetry, policy enforcement, and microsegmentation

    - Where companies like NVIDIA (BlueField-3), AMD (Pensando), Intel, Marvell, Fungible, Microsoft (Azure Boost), and Cisco (Hypershield) are racing to redefine infrastructure

    - Why financial institutions, hospitals, and hyperscalers are already deploying DPUs at scale

    - What this means for your observability, east-west controls, and AI agent governance

    The $5.5B DPU market isn’t a footnote—it’s a warning shot. If your stack isn’t built to segment, inspect, and enforce in real-time, it’s not ready for AI. And the next wave of agentic systems isn’t going to wait.

    Más Menos
    22 m
  • Less small talk, more substance
    Sep 9 2025

    Everyone’s chasing generative AI for flash, but a quiet revolution is happening where the real money is: predictive AI. In this episode, F5's Lori MacVittie, Joel Moses, and Dmitry Kit dig into how a team of researchers used machine learning—not an LLM—to design a paint that passively cools buildings by up to 20 degrees. No prompts. No hallucinations. Just real-world impact through smart pattern recognition. Listen in as we unpack what this means for enterprise leaders chasing efficiency, and why your ops and sales teams should be looking for better recipes—not better word salad. It's not about generating magic. It's about discovering truth at scale.

    Learn how you can stay ahead of the curve and keep your stack whole with additional insights on app security, multicloud, AI, and emerging tech: https://www.f5.com/company/octo

    Más Menos
    21 m
  • The perimeter has shifted
    Sep 2 2025

    The perimeter isn’t where you left it. Agents are on the move, APIs are on fire, and your infrastructure is about as ready for this as a fax machine is for a DDoS. In this week's episode, Lori, Joel and F5 Field CISO, Chuck Herrin, are talking guardrails—real ones—for the age of agentic AI.

    Because while your dashboards were busy sipping metrics, the vendors got serious. Recent product launches show a clear pivot toward AI-specific defenses and infrastructure support like: an AI firewall, AI runtime protection, semantic observability, and AI policy and rule generation.

    Turns out, stateless APIs weren’t built for recursive agents with infinite retries and zero chill. If your architecture still thinks AI means ‘autocomplete,’ you’re going to want to tune in for actionable steps to stay ahead in an AI-dominated future. It’s not just about security. It’s survival. Let’s go.

    Más Menos
    26 m
  • AI Joel: Who owns him?
    Aug 26 2025

    In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Lori MacVittie, Joel Moses, and Ken Arora delve into the complex issue of ownership with respect to your AI-driven digital twin. As organizations consider the use of AI avatars and AI twins, explore the nuances of employment contracts, intellectual property, and the potential for creating AI models based on an employee's data. The discussion ranges from corporate IP ownership to legal precedents from the entertainment industry, touching on futuristic concepts like posthumous digital replicas and their ethical implications. Tune in to find out how your everyday work data could be shaping the AI models of tomorrow and who owns the rights in this evolving landscape.

    Más Menos
    23 m
  • Old is New Again: Bandwidth will be the AI bottleneck
    Aug 19 2025

    AI doesn't just chew up compute—it eats your network for breakfast. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Lori MacVittie, Joel Moses, and Ken Arora dig into the pressing issues surrounding AI workloads and networking. Everyone's worried about GPUs and cooling, but nobody’s talking about the lateral east-west traffic explosion, the rise of inter-agent comms, or the operational strain on DCN fabric and interconnects. Our experts discuss the importance of upgrading data center networks to accommodate AI demands, examining the differences between training and inferencing workloads. The conversation also covers the necessity of high-performance networking, the relevance of latency, data gravity, and the potential expansion of data centers. Tune in to get valuable insights into the challenges and solutions shaping the future of AI-driven applications.

    Más Menos
    24 m
  • Fine-tuning on a Budget
    Aug 12 2025

    Big models, tight budgets? No problem. In this episode of Pop Goes the stack, hosts Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses talk with Dmitry Kit from F5's AI Center of Excellence about LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation), the not-so-secret weapon for customizing LLMs without melting your GPU or your wallet. From role-specific agents to domain-aware behavior, we break down how LoRA lets you inject intelligence without retraining the entire brain. Whether you're building AI for IT ops, customer support, or anything in between, this is fine-tuning that actually scales. Learn about the benefits, risks, and practical applications of using LoRA to target specific model behavior, reduce latency, and optimize performance, all for under $1,000. Tune in to understand how LoRA can revolutionize your approach to AI and machine learning.

    Más Menos
    21 m