BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes Nvidia DPU deployment walkthrough

 

Introduction

Modern AI factories—hyperscale environments powering everything from generative AI to autonomous systems—are pushing the limits of traditional infrastructure. As these facilities process exabytes of data and demand near-real-time communication between thousands of GPUs, legacy CPUs struggle to balance application logic with infrastructure tasks like networking, encryption, and storage management.

Data Processing Units (DPUs), purpose-built accelerators that offload these housekeeping tasks, freeing CPUs and GPUs to focus on what they do best. DPUs are specialized system-on-chip (SoC) devices designed to handle data-centric operations such as network virtualization, storage processing, and security enforcement. By decoupling infrastructure management from computational workloads, DPUs reduce latency, lower operational costs, and enable AI factories to scale horizontally.

Figure1: DPU distributing traffic between GPU / CPU

 

BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes and Nvidia DPU

Looking at F5 ability to deliver and secure every app, we needed it to be deployed at multiple levels, a crucial one being edge and DPU. 

Installing F5 BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes on Nvidia DPU requires installing Nvidia’s DOCA framework to be installed. What’s DOCA?

NVIDIA DOCA is a software development kit for NVIDIA BlueField DPUs. BlueField provides data center infrastructure-on-a-chip, optimized for high-performance enterprise and cloud computing. DOCA is the key to unlocking the potential of the NVIDIA BlueField data processing unit (DPU) to offload, accelerate, and isolate data center workloads. With DOCA, developers can program the data center infrastructure of tomorrow by creating software-defined, cloud-native, GPU-accelerated services with zero-trust protection.

Now, let's explore BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes components, 

The BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes solution has two main parts: the Data Plane - Traffic Management Micro-kernel (TMM) and the Control Plane. The Control Plane watches over the Kubernetes cluster and updates the TMM’s configurations. The BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes Data Plane (TMM) manages the supply of network traffic both entering and leaving the Kubernetes cluster. It also proxies the traffic to applications running in the Kubernetes cluster.

The Data Plane (TMM) runs on the BlueField-3 Data Processing Unit (DPU) node. It uses all the DPU resources to handle the traffic and frees up the Host (CPU) for applications. The Control Plane can work on the CPU or other nodes in the Kubernetes cluster. This makes sure that the DPU is still used for processing traffic.

Figure3: TMM at DPU, Control plane at Host CPU

Use-case examples: 

There are some recently awesome use cases released by F5’s team based on conversation and work from the field. Let’s explore those items: 

  • Protecting MCPservers with F5 BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes deployed on NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs 
  • LLMrouting withdynamicloadbalancing with F5 BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes deployed on NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs
  • F5optimizes GPUs fordistributed AIinferencing with NVIDIA Dynamo and KVcache integration. 

 

Deployment walk-through 

In our demo, we go through the configurations from BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes

 

 

Main BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes features

  • L4 ingress flow 
  • HTTP/HTTPs ingress flow 
  • Egress flow 
  • BGP integration 
  • Logging and troubleshooting (Qkview, iHealth)

You can find a quick walk-through via BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes - walk-through 

 

Related Content 

Published Jun 17, 2025
Version 1.0

1 Comment

  • Great read for NVIDIA users. Powerful use cases backed by demonstrations