AI Friday Live: NVIDIA GTC - Disney Robots, Blackwell, Groot, Newton And More!
Join us for our first live episode of AI Friday, where we delve into the latest and most exciting developments in the world of artificial intelligence. This week, we discuss the major announcements from NVIDIA's GTC conference, including insights on their new Blackwell chips and the fascinating advancements in autonomous vehicles. Our very own Buu Lam from DevCentral shares his firsthand experience and key takeaways from the event. In addition, we explore the groundbreaking world of robotics, highlighting how Disney's cute robots, powered by NVIDIA and Google DeepMind, are set to revolutionize the industry. We also tease our upcoming episode featuring Steve Wilson, where we will discuss the OWASP Gen AI Security Project and its implications for large language model applications. Don't miss out on this engaging and informative discussion! Would you like some fish with all those new chips? DGX Spark / Station Robotics: Groot and Newton Nemotron ModelsAI Friday: Agentic AI, Helix VLAM, Google Gemini Robotics, Managing Agents
Join us for another exciting episode of AI Friday! This week, we delve into the latest advancements and news in the world of artificial intelligence. Our hosts, Aubrey, Lori, Ken, and Byron, discuss the fascinating developments in agentic AI, exploring its implications for autonomy, memory, and perception. We also touch on the potential risks and security concerns associated with this cutting-edge technology. Don't forget to join us on March 28th for a special live stream with Steve Wilson, the founder of the OWASP Top Ten for Large Language Model Applications. It's going to be an insightful session you won't want to miss! Stay tuned for engaging discussions, intriguing insights, and a sneak peek into the future of AI technology. Make sure to hit the like button, subscribe to our channel, and click the notification bell so you never miss an episode of AI Friday! Resources: Rise Of The Thinking Machines Real Robots Gemini Robotics Managing AI AgentsAlexa+, GPT-5 Pricing, and Livestream Announcement - AI Friday Ep.10
Join us for an exciting AI Friday episode where we dive deep into the latest developments in artificial intelligence! This week, we're bringing you the most pertinent AI news, discussing the intriguing case of psychopathic AI models, and announcing our very first live stream on March 28th with the esteemed Steve Wilson, CTO of Exabeam and a key figure in the OWASP Top Ten for LLM Apps and Generative AI. In this episode, we also explore the launch of Amazon's Alexa+ and its implications for the AI ecosystem. Additionally, we break down the new GPT-5 pricing model, examining its potential impact on the market. Special thanks to Kid Rock for unexpectedly boosting our visibility, plus, get ready to meet our expert guests Ken Arora, Chuck Herrin, Laurie MacVittie, and Joel Moses as they provide their unique insights into the world of AI. Tune in now to stay ahead of the curve in the ever-evolving field of artificial intelligence! Here are the articles we chatted on: Trained Model Goes Psychopath OpenAI Pay-For-Brains Plan Introducing Alexa+ Infinite RetrievalIntroducing F5 BIG-IP Next CNF Solutions for Red Hat OpenShift
5G and Red Hat OpenShift 5G standards have embraced Cloud-Native Network Functions (CNFs) for implementing network services in software as containers. This is a big change from previous Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) or Physical Network Functions (PNFs). The main characteristics of Cloud-Native Functions are: Implementation as containerized microservices Small performance footprint, with the ability to scale horizontally Independence of guest operating system, since CNFs operate as containers Lifecycle manageable by Kubernetes Overall, these provide a huge improvement in terms of flexibility, faster service delivery, resiliency, and crucially using Kubernetes as unified orchestration layer. The later is a drastic change from previous standards where each vendor had its own orchestration. This unification around Kubernetes greatly simplifies network functions for operators, reducing cost of deploying and maintaining networks. Additionally, by embracing the container form factor, allows Network Functions (NFs) to be deployed in new use cases like far edge. This is thanks to the smaller footprint while at the same time these can be also deployed at large scale in a central data center because of the horizontal scalability. In this article we focus on Red Hat OpenShift which is the market leading and industry reference implementation of Kubernetes for IT and Telco workloads. Introduction to F5 BIG-IP Next CNF Solutions F5 BIG-IP Next CNF Solutions is a suite of Kubernetes native 5G Network Functions, implemented as microservices. It shares the same Cloud Native Engine (CNE) as F5 BIG-IP Next SPK introduced last year. The functionalities implemented by the CNF Solutions deal mainly with user plane data. User plane data has the particularity that the final destination of the traffic is not the Kubernetes cluster but rather an external end-point, typically the Internet. In other words, the traffic gets in the Kubernetes cluster and it is forwarded out of the cluster again. This is done using dedicated interfaces that are not used for the regular ingress and egress paths of the regular traffic of a Kubernetes cluster. In this case, the main purpose of using Kubernetes is to make use of its orchestration, flexibility, and scalability. The main functionalities implemented at initial GA release of the CNF Solutions are: F5 Next Edge Firewall CNF, an IPv4/IPv6 firewall with the main focus in protecting the 5G core networks from external threads, including DDoS flood protection and IPS DNS protocol inspection. F5 Next CGNAT CNF, which offers large scale NAT with the following features: NAPT, Port Block Allocation, Static NAT, Address Pooling Paired, and Endpoint Independent mapping modes. Inbound NAT and Hairpining. Egress path filtering and address exclusions. ALG support: FTP/FTPS, TFTP, RTSP and PPTP. F5 Next DNS CNF, which offers a transparent DNS resolver and caching services. Other remarkable features are: Zero rating DNS64 which allows IPv6-only clients connect to IPv4-only services via synthetic IPv6 addresses. F5 Next Policy Enforcer CNF, which provides traffic classification, steering and shaping, and TCP and video optimization. This product is launched as Early Access in February 2023 with basic functionalities. Static TCP optimization is now GA in the initial release. Although the CGNAT (Carrier Grade NAT) and the Policy Enforcer functionalities are specific to User Plane use cases, the Edge Firewall and DNS functionalities have additional uses in other places of the network. F5 and OpenShift BIG-IP Next CNF Solutions fully supports Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform which allows the deployment in edge or core locations with a unified management across the multiple deployments. OpenShift operators greatly facilitates the setup and tuning of telco grade applications. These are: Node Tuning Operator, used to setup Hugepages. CPU Manager and Topology Manager with NUMA awareness which allows to schedule the data plane PODs within a NUMA domain which is aligned with the SR-IOV NICs they are attached to. In an OpenShift platform all these are setup transparently to the applications and BIG-IP Next CNF Solutions uniquely require to be configured with an appropriate runtimeClass. F5 BIG-IP Next CNF Solutions architecture F5 BIG-IP Next CNF Solutions makes use of the widely trusted F5 BIG-IP Traffic Management Microkernel (TMM) data plane. This allows for a high performance, dependable product from the start. The CNF functionalities come from a microservices re-architecture of the broadly used F5 BIG-IP VNFs. The below diagram illustrates how a microservices architecture used. The data plane POD scales vertically from 1 to 16 cores and scales horizontally from 1 to 32 PODs, enabling it to handle millions of subscribers. NUMA nodes are supported. The next diagram focuses on the data plane handling which is the most relevant aspect for this CNF suite: Typically, each data plane POD has two IP address, one for each side of the N6 reference point. These could be named radio and Internet sides as shown in the diagram above. The left-side L3 hop must distribute the traffic amongst the lef-side addresses of the CNF data plane. This left-side L3 hop can be a router with BGP ECMP (Equal Cost Multi Path), an SDN or any other mechanism which is able to: Distribute the subscribers across the data plane PODs, shown in [1] of the figure above. Keep these subscribers in the same PODs when there is a change in the number of active data plane PODs (scale-in, scale-out, maintenance, etc...) as shown in [2] in the figure above. This minimizes service disruption. In the right side of the CNFs, the path towards the Internet, it is typical to implement NAT functionality to transform telco's private addresses to public addresses. This is done with the BIG-IP Next CG-NAT CNF. This NAT makes the return traffic symmetrical by reaching the same POD which processed the outbound traffic. This is thanks to each POD owning part of this NAT space, as shown in [3] of the above figure. Each POD´s NAT address space can be advertised via BGP. When not using NAT in the right side of the CNFs, it is required that the network is able to send the return traffic back to the same POD which is processing the same connection. The traffic must be kept symmetrical at all times, this is typically done with an SDN. Using F5 BIG-IP Next CNF Solutions As expected in a fully integrated Kubernetes solution, both the installation and configuration is done using the Kubernetes APIs. The installation is performed using helm charts, and the configuration using Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs). Unlike using ConfigMaps, using CRDs allow for schema validation of the configurations before these are applied. Details of the CRDs can be found in this clouddocs site. Next it is shown an overview of the most relevant CRDs. General network configuration Deploying in Kubernetes automatically configures and assigns IP addresses to the CNF PODs. The data plane interfaces will require specific configuration. The required steps are: Create Kubernetes NetworkNodePolicies and NetworkAttchment definitions which will allow to expose SR-IOV VFs to the CNF data planes PODs (TMM). To make use of these SR-IOV VFs these are referenced in the BIG-IP controller's Helm chart values file. This is described in the Networking Overview page. Define the L2 and L3 configuration of the exposed SR-IOV interfaces using the F5BigNetVlan CRD. If static routes need to be configured, these can be added using the F5BigNetStaticroute CRD. If BGP configuration needs to be added, this is configured in the BIG-IP controller's Helm chart values file. This is described in the BGP Overview page. It is expected this will be configured using a CRD in the future. Traffic management listener configuration As with classic BIG-IP, once the CNFs are running and plumbed in the network, no traffic is processed by default. The traffic management functionalities implemented by BIG-IP Next CNF Solutions are the same of the analogous modules in the classic BIG-IP, and the CRDs in BIG-IP Next to configure these functionalities are conceptually similar too. Analogous to Virtual Servers in classic BIG-IP, BIG-IP Next CNF Solutions have a set of CRDs that create listeners of traffic where traffic management policies are applied. This is mainly the F5BigContextSecure CRD which allows to specify traffic selectors indicating VLANs, source, destination prefixes and ports where we want the policies to be applied. There are specific CRDs for listeners of Application Level Gateways (ALGs) and protocol specific solutions. These required several steps in classic BIG-IP: first creating the Virtual Service, then creating the profile and finally applying it to the Virtual Server. In BIG-IP Next this is done in a single CRD. At time of this writing, these CRDs are: F5BigZeroratingPolicy - Part of Zero-Rating DNS solution; enabling subscribers to bypass rate limits. F5BigDnsApp - High-performance DNS resolution, caching, and DNS64 translations. F5BigAlgFtp - File Transfer Protocol (FTP) application layer gateway services. F5BigAlgTftp - Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) application layer gateway services. F5BigAlgPptp - Point-to-Point Tunnelling Protocol (PPTP) application layer gateway services. F5BigAlgRtsp - Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) application layer gateway services. Traffic management profiles and policies configuration Depending on the type of listener created, these can have attached different types of profiles and policies. In the case of F5BigContextSecure it can get attached the following CRDs to define how traffic is processed: F5BigTcpSetting - TCP options to fine-tune how application traffic is managed. F5BigUdpSetting - UDP options to fine-tune how application traffic is managed. F5BigFastl4Setting - FastL4 option to fine-tune how application traffic is managed. and the following policies for security and NAT: F5BigDdosPolicy - Denial of Service (DoS/DDoS) event detection and mitigation. F5BigFwPolicy - Granular stateful-flow filtering based on access control list (ACL) policies. F5BigIpsPolicy - Intelligent packet inspection protects applications from malignant network traffic. F5BigNatPolicy - Carrier-grade NAT (CG-NAT) using large-scale NAT (LSN) pools. The ALG listeners require the use of F5BigNatPolicy and might make use for the F5BigFwPolicy CRDs. These CRDs have also traffic selectors to allow further control over which traffic these policies should be applied to. Firewall Contexts Firewall policies are applied to the listener with best match. In addition to the F5BigFwPolicy that might be attached, a global firewall policy (hence effective in all listeners) can be configured before the listener specific firewall policy is evaluated. This is done with F5BigContextGlobal CRD, which can have attached a F5BigFwPolicy. F5BigContextGlobal also contains the default action to apply on traffic not matching any firewall rule in any context (e.g. Global Context or Secure Context or another listener). This default action can be set to accept, reject or drop and whether to log this default action. In summary, within a listener match, the firewall contexts are processed in this order: ContextGlobal Matching ContextSecure or another listener context. Default action as defined by ContextGlobal's default action. Event Logging Event logging at high speed is critical to provide visibility of what the CNFs are doing. For this the next CRDs are implemented: F5BigLogProfile - Specifies subscriber connection information sent to remote logging servers. F5BigLogHslpub - Defines remote logging server endpoints for the F5BigLogProfile. Demo F5 BIG-IP Next CNF Solutions roadmap What it is being exposed here is just the begin of a journey. Telcos have embraced Kubernetes as compute and orchestration layer. Because of this, BIG-IP Next CNF Solutions will eventually replace the analogous classic BIG-IP VNFs. Expect in the upcoming months that BIG-IP Next CNF Solutions will match and eventually surpass the features currently being offered by the analogous VNFs. Conclusion This article introduces fully re-architected, scalable solution for Red Hat OpenShift mainly focused on telco's user plane. This new microservices architecture offers flexibility, faster service delivery, resiliency and crucially the use of Kubernetes. Kubernetes is becoming the unified orchestration layer for telcos, simplifying infrastructure lifecycle, and reducing costs. OpenShift represents the best-in-class Kubernetes platform thanks to its enterprise readiness and Telco specific features. The architecture of this solution alongside the use of OpenShift also extends network services use cases to the edge by allowing the deployment of Network Functions in a smaller footprint. Please check the official BIG-IP Next CNF Solutions documentation for more technical details and check www.f5.com for a high level overview.DevCentral MVP Program
Every day, all over the world, smart, passionate people are doing amazing things with their F5 gear and sharing that knowledge with their peers. The DevCentral Community MVP program shines a spotlight on the best, brightest and most active members of our community, and rewards them for their efforts. The DevCentral Community MVP is an annual award given to a select cohort of the best, brightest, and most active members of our community - users who actively improve F5 user communities and the broader tech industry by sharing their technical experience and expertise with others. We like to reward people who help make our technical user communities healthy and a place users want to interact, and would like to say thank-you to you specifically for making our communities a valuable resource for all users. MVPs get a special badge on their profile for the calendar year of their cohort, so users can know at a glance who they are. Among other things, they also get exclusive swag, invitations to technical deep-dive and sneak-preview sessions presented by F5 SMEs, invitations to the MVP Group and are often highlighted in our monthly Featured Member articles. Here's the announcement of the 2023 cohort! To nominate someone who has helped you to be an MVP, click HERE.Announcing Unovis 1.5
On Dec 12, 2022, F5 proudly introduced Unovis to the world. Two years later, we’re excited to announce the launch of Unovis 1.5! This release brings Solid support, compatibility with React 19 and Angular 19, and many exciting enhancements. To see the full list of updates, please look at our release notes on Github. Introduction Unovis is a modular, open-source data visualization framework designed for React, Angular, Svelte, Vue, Solid, and TypeScript/JavaScript. With 25,000+ weekly downloads, it powers dynamic and scalable visualizations. Unovis also serves as the core data visualization engine for F5’s Distributed Cloud platform. Support for Solid Unovis now works with Solid - one of the most performant JSX frameworks. Graph 1.5 release added a lot of new features to Graph: Provide your own functions to render nodes allowing you to highly customize how the graph looks (docs). Post-Layout (docs) and Post-Render Customization (docs) allow you to modify the layout of the graph on the fly and render additional layers with D3. Provide custom SVG icons to link labels (docs). Zoom start/end and node dragging callbacks (docs). Fit view to specific nodes by providing an array of node ids. Multiple node selection (docs). Enable Graph nodes to accept pre-calculated layout data (docs). Tooltip Tooltip now can be anchored to the target element, can be hovered over, and supports dynamic content (updates if the content changes) (docs). Axis Axis now automatically hides overlapping labels (docs) and supports label rotation (docs). Resources Stay up to date with the latest news and updates—join our Discord community! Want to contribute? Check out our contribution guidelines and get involved!
