What's new with F5 ADSP
Updated: February 2026
Updated: February 2026
F5 Initiatives that are moving the needle
Awards and recognition within the industry
In November, F5 was recognized in Gartner’s Innovation Guide for GenAI Engineering and its Emerging Market Quadrant (eMQ), highlighting our runtime security capabilities.
Gartner Innovation Guide for Generative AI Engineering, 13 November, 2025.
F5 has been recognized as a Leader across the Product, Market, and Innovation categories, and is the most highly rated Challenger. The report highlights our strengths in adaptive runtime protection and offensive testing that address emerging AI risks at scale. This recognition reinforces F5’s leadership in helping enterprises secure and govern AI systems without slowing innovation.
F5 is one of several vendors listed in the report. Forrester defines bot and agent trust management as software that identifies and analyzes the intent of automated traffic directed at an application, establishing ongoing trusted relationships with good bots and AI agents and rejecting and misdirecting malicious bots and AI agents, to protect legitimate customer business while also increasing attacker costs.
Forrester defines web application protection platforms as unified, integrated solutions that examine input to and responses from web applications, mobile apps, and APIs to filter application traffic according to defined policies; to detect and block application exploits, application attacks, volumetric attacks, and business logic attacks; and to recommend and enforce security policies based on attack signatures, protocol standards, and anomaly detection.
API gateways are increasingly seen as the “connective tissue” for autonomous software and agentic workflows, acting as access control points and a mediation layer for LLMs and AI agents. F5 NGINX Plus is included as a Representative Vendor for the second year in a row in Gartner’s Market Guide for API Gateways, highlighting its role in scalable API delivery and security for modern, AI-driven applications.
Edge distribution platforms (EDPs) deliver more than content distribution. They enable enhanced content distribution, visibility and control over applications, security, and AI capabilities at the edge to support modern enterprise applications. The adoption of EDP for edge computing is accelerating, with AI and generative AI use cases in particular, driving increased investment and strategic value for organizations.F5 is listed as Representative Vendor with a vendor profile highlighting F5 Distributed Cloud CDN, App Connect, and Cloud WAAP.
Gartner Market Guide for Edge Distribution Platforms, 17 November 2025
Gartner defines an AI gateway as a technology or platform that acts as an intermediary between applications and various artificial intelligence (AI) services or models. Its purpose is to simplify and manage access to AI capabilities, providing a central point to enable security, governance and observability of AI workloads. F5 AI Guardrails is included as a Representative Vendor.
Gartner Market Guide for AI Gateways, 13 October 2025
F5 continues to expand its AI-focused solutions with advanced support for MCP in BIG-IP version 21, introducing standardized traffic management that enables load balancing, optimization, and enhanced security for AI applications (and data sources). In addition, F5 has strengthened its AI security portfolio through the acquisition of CalypsoAI in September 2025, integrating AI Guardrails and AI Red Team capabilities. These tools empower enterprises to validate, monitor, and safeguard AI model behavior, enabling robust protection and compliance as AI deployments become more complex and widespread.
Noteworthy product improvements or launches
BIG-IP v21.0 is now available and introduces major improvements to the control plane, greater support for AI workloads, new BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator capabilities, and significantly improved software quality and security. More details available here.
F5 NGINX Plus R36 is now available, adding forward proxy support, enhanced ACME-based certificate automation, and ready-to-use container images with popular modules included. These improvements simplify deployment and operations, reduce configuration effort, and accelerate enterprise adoption by delivering faster time to value and greater operational consistency across modern hybrid environments. Details available here.
These releases advance Kubernetes application delivery with native support for LLM and Gen AI inference routing via the Gateway API Inference Extension, deeper OpenShift integration, and more flexible traffic management. Version 2.3 continues this momentum with Gateway API v1.4.1 conformance, reinforcing standards compliance and interoperability. Details available here.
F5 NGINX Ingress Controller 5.3.0 arrives as ingress-nginx approaches retirement in 2026. This release strengthens a familiar, production-grade alternative with easier migration via compatibility annotations, enhanced caching with CRD support, cross-namespace routing for multi-tenancy, and improved OpenID Connect capabilities—addressing key customer requests while simplifying enterprise adoption. Details available here.
This release enhances security and efficiency with a new WAF management GUI, on-demand policy compilation, automated bot signatures updates, and Kubernetes SKU visibility. Usability improvements streamline operations, while modern workflows reduce risks and deployment complexity. Explore the latest features for optimized NGINX management. Details available here.
The November 2025 release enhances self-serviceability, search and filtering, and mitigation management. Details available in the release blog.
This release brought important upgrades to API security, making it easier for organizations to discover, protect, and test APIs across a variety of environments. The release introduced out-of-band API discovery for BIG-IP, now Generally Available (GA), and extends out-of-band API discovery support to NGINX and other third-party proxies in Early Access (EA). For customers with strict compliance needs, local API discovery – now in EA – enables visibility without sending data to the cloud. The platform also streamlines the process with manual code scan initiation and clear status indicators for crawler-based discovery. New detection capabilities against critical API threats such as BOPLA attacks and Broken Authentication, and enhancements to anomaly detection for administrative endpoints. The API testing suite now covers additional testing scenarios broadening the services ability to detect a wider range of API vulnerabilities, helping organizations uncover more vulnerabilities and strengthen their security posture in multi-cloud environments.
Blog post: Stay ahead of API security risks with our latest F5 Distributed Cloud Services Release ›
Delivers robust new capabilities for defending applications against DDoS attacks. DDoS mitigation is now more flexible, with customer-configurable thresholds for Layer 7 detection, support for CAPTCHA and JavaScript challenges as protection actions, and expanded visibility into L3 / L4 events for managed load balancers. Rate limiting has been enhanced with persistent and timeout-based blocking, and denylist management is now streamlined for easier identification of duplicate entries.
Improves WAF management. WAF controls have been upgraded. Service policies can now be configured at the route level, allowing exclusion rules to be shared across namespaces, load balancers, and routes—reducing management overhead and inconsistencies. Now supports JA4 TLS fingerprint observability, providing deeper insights into traffic patterns and security analytics. These improvements collectively empower teams to better protect applications, simplify policy management, and gain actionable visibility into security events.
F5NGINXaaS for Google Cloud is now available in additional regions, giving our customers more flexibility and performance benefits across the United States and Europe. This expansion means lower latency, improved reliability, and simplified operations for organizations running cloud-native applications on Google Cloud. You can find the continuously expanding list of supported regions for F5 NGINXaaS for Google Cloud here.
Simplify workflows with NGINX Config Templates and an introductory Reverse Proxy Template for fast setups. Enhance observability with user-defined diagnostic dashboards and performance monitoring for Configuration Sync Groups (CSG) to identify bottlenecks, optimize applications, and scale with actionable insights. Details available here.
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