Kubernetes has become an invaluable platform for automating the deployment, scaling, and orchestration of containerized applications. However, organizations often struggle to consistently deliver high-performance application and network services—such as traffic management, load balancing, and application security—to Kubernetes workloads, especially when managing multiple Kubernetes clusters across complex hybrid and multicloud environments.
Combining these critical management and security services into dynamic, fast-changing containerized workflows often requires error-prone manual configurations, which can lead to operational bottlenecks, security flaws, and configuration drift.
“The combined F5-Broadcom solution provides a single, automated architecture that offers compute, storage, networking, and cloud management along with a Kubernetes-native control plane.”
A validated Kubernetes solution from industry leaders
F5 offers a validated solution to ease the complexity of managing Kubernetes environments while maintaining consistent security, availability, and performance across clusters.
F5 BIG-IP Container Ingress Services (CIS) interoperates with VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS), a CNCF-certified Kubernetes runtime on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) watching Kubernetes resources (such as Ingress Services) and automatically programming BIG-IP to deliver enterprise-grade application connectivity for workloads deployed on VKS.
The combined F5 and Broadcom solution provides a single, automated architecture that offers compute, storage, networking, and cloud management along with a Kubernetes-native control plane that enables scalable traffic management, centralized policy enforcement, and consistent L4-L7 services across clusters and environments.
F5 and Broadcom are long-time technology partners. F5’s validated interoperability between BIG-IP CIS and VKS supports our many mutual customers by extending F5 application services to the VCF to deliver a secure, scalable, and operationally consistent application platform that helps customers modernize containerized infrastructures with confidence.
Manage and protect Kubernetes workloads at scale
BIG-IP CIS serves as a bridge between best-in-breed F5 BIG-IP features and services and Kubernetes clusters, enabling dynamic application visibility and multi-cluster load balancing in containerized environments.
Organizations can recognize and track multi-cluster availability, with the ability to monitor system health to detect outages and fail-over applications across clusters to improve uptime and disaster recovery. The capacity to gracefully detect and redirect requests in complex Kubernetes deployments is a significant advantage of BIG-IP CIS compared to most out-of-the-box container management tools.
Together, BIG-IP CIS and VKS give F5 and Broadcom customers robust options for container management and security, enabling users to publish, monitor, and protect Kubernetes applications using industry-leading tools from BIG-IP. This delivers significant benefits, including:
- Secure data transmission to help ensure that private data cannot be intercepted or stolen, with advanced TLS encryption and safe key storage with support for both physical and cloud-based hardware security modules.
- Protection for web applications, mobile apps, and APIs, with advanced WAF and L7 bot and API security to defend against sophisticated, application-specific threats.
- High-performance network security that filters traffic based on routing and connection details, while actively blocking attacks by verifying that data packets perfectly follow official communication rules, with a L3-L4 firewall and an intrusion protection system (IPS) for protocol conformance.
- Powerful multi-layered security to defend against cyberattacks, using smart analytics and behavioral DDoS protection to identify threats, and cloud scrubbing support to filter out malicious traffic remotely.
- Visibility into encrypted TLS traffic for inspection with third-party security solutions like firewalls or malware scanners.
- Identity-aware ingress to check user credentials at the network edge and block unauthorized access, with federated single sign-on (SSO) and integration with leading multi-factor authentication (MFA) providers.
- AI inference and agentic support, thanks to JSON and Model Context Protocol (MCP) support.
Modernize with confidence
The combination of vSphere Kubernetes Service and F5 BIG-IP Container Ingress Services helps ensure that your modern applications are not just deployed faster, but are also more secure and scalable. By standardizing on VCF for compute and networking while using F5 for intelligent traffic management, your organization can achieve a consistent, repeatable, and automated application solution across any environment.
Explore this reference architecture to see how you can combine F5 BIG-IP CIS with your VKS environment.
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