F5 NGINX and Red Hat OpenShift both have long, respected pedigrees in the open source world, powering thousands of enterprise applications and modern infrastructure deployments. Over time, we’ve also forged a significant common base of developers and platform teams that rely on both technologies to build, secure, and scale Kubernetes environments.
Responding to the growing demand for proven networking solutions for Kubernetes, F5 is now collaborating with Red Hat on a solution that brings together the high performance application delivery of F5 NGINX Gateway Fabric with Red Hat OpenShift’s robust enterprise Kubernetes capabilities.
NGINX Gateway Fabric is now a certified solution for Red Hat OpenShift. This gives DevOps and platform teams an additional, trusted option for delivering, securing, and scaling their services in Kubernetes environments. NGINX is already widely adopted across enterprises for its performance, flexibility, and reliability—making it a natural fit for Red Hat OpenShift users looking to deliver apps, APIs, and AI workloads under one proven, open source framework.
“Together, F5 and NGINX are making it easier for teams to deliver services in Kubernetes. This certification of F5 NGINX Gateway Fabric on Red Hat OpenShift provides a more consistent framework for deploying, routing, and securing applications across clusters—simplifying operations while giving teams flexibility and control.”
NGINX Gateway Fabric on Red Hat OpenShift delivers a tighter, more optimized experience for customers seeking to simplify traffic management and strengthen security and compliance across hybrid and multicloud environments.
Kubernetes momentum continues to build
F5 has a long-standing relationship with Red Hat, spanning 11 years and multiple solution areas. With this new solution supported on Red Hat OpenShift, F5 seeks to help enterprises take the next step in Kubernetes maturity—aligning open source innovation with the reliability, governance, and scalability that today’s production workloads demand.
It’s part of a broader shift underway across industries, as organizations turn to Kubernetes and containerized solutions to modernize applications while providing control, compliance, and performance. This includes regulated industries seeking to heighten security and compliance across complex, distributed environments.
According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s 2024 Cloud Native Survey, 93% of organizations are using, piloting, or evaluating Kubernetes, with roughly 80% running it in production. The research also found that enterprise usage has deepened, with many organizations now operating 20 or more clusters across multiple environments.
With the global Kubernetes market projected to grow more than 20% annually through 2030, the platform has become mission-critical infrastructure for enterprise IT.
Optimization a win-win for both partners and customers
Today’s applications have evolved from monolithic, tightly coupled architectures to microservices, where each component runs independently in containers. This improves agility and resilience.
Kubernetes orchestrates large numbers of containers. Red Hat OpenShift is the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes and one of the most widely adopted enterprise Kubernetes platforms. It is especially attractive to regulated industries and organizations lacking deep internal expertise.
With NGINX Gateway Fabric, customers can employ the latest emerging standard for delivering services running in Kubernetes, improving portability and security, while reducing operational burden.
Using NGINX on Red Hat OpenShift, customers can benefit from one of the most widely deployed load balancing and traffic management solutions on the market today
Gateway API and Inference API Extension support
The solution supports both the Gateway API—the open source, community-driven standard for Kubernetes networking—and the Inference API Extension, an emerging open specification for serving AI workloads, on Red Hat OpenShift.
The Gateway API gives teams a consistent, Kubernetes-native way to manage traffic across clusters. Developers can define and route services efficiently, using portable CRDs that work across environments. Platform teams can enforce policies, security, and routing at scale, while operations teams gain full observability and control over network behavior. Its scalable design helps ensure deployments remain reliable, simplifying multi-tenancy and making infrastructure easier to maintain and extend as applications grow.
The Inference API Extension brings AI and machine learning workloads into the Gateway API framework, enabling teams to deploy, expose, and scale models with Kubernetes-native consistency. It supports AI-aware load balancing and modern-aware routing, so developers can efficiently manage model endpoints, platform teams can enforce policies and security, and operation teams gain full visibility and control. This makes machine learning deployments portable, scalable, and seamlessly integrated into existing infrastructure.
F5 is among the few providers that support the Inference API Extension. For customers, this means flexibility and future readiness that few enterprise platforms can match.
Together, F5 and NGINX are making it easier for teams to deliver services in Kubernetes. This certification of F5 NGINX Gateway Fabric on Red Hat OpenShift provides a more consistent framework for deploying, routing, and securing applications across clusters—simplifying operations while giving teams flexibility and control.
More innovation to come
Expect to hear more about advancements from the F5 NGINX and Red Hat collaboration in 2026 and beyond.
To learn more, visit our partner page
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