Pop Goes the Stack

F5
  • 0.0 (0)
  • TECHNOLOGY
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

Explore the evolving world of application delivery and security. Each episode will dive into technologies shaping the future of operations, analyze emerging trends, and discuss the impacts of innovations on the tech stack.

Episodes

  1. 6D AGO

    When Context Eats Your Architecture

    Anthropic lobbed a million-token grenade into the coding wars, and suddenly every AI startup with a “clever context management” pitch looks like it’s selling floppy disks in a cloud world. If your entire differentiator was “we chunk code better than the other guy,” congratulations—you’ve been chunked. This is what happens when the model itself shows up to the fight with a bigger backpack.    But here’s the twist—this isn’t just about writing bigger code files without losing track of your variables. For enterprises, context size is an architectural shift. A million-token window means you can shove your entire compliance manual, last year’s customer interactions, and that dusty COBOL spec into one call—no brittle session stitching, no RAG duct tape. It collapses architectural complexity… and replaces it with new headaches: governance of massive payloads, cost blowouts if you treat tokens like they’re free, and rethinking model routing strategies. Context isn’t just memory anymore—it’s a first-class infrastructure decision.    Press play to hear F5 hosts Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses, joined by special guest Vishal Murgai, unravel what's next for enterprise AI.

    22 min

  2. SEP 16

    The DPU Awakening: Silicon Muscle for AI Mayhem

    This week on Pop Goes the Stack, we crack open the next frontier of enterprise infrastructure: DPUs (Data Processing Units). AI factories aren’t just stressing your network—they’re setting it on fire. With east-west traffic exploding and inference storms growing by the day, CPUs and legacy firewalls just can’t keep up. Enter the DPU: purpose-built to offload, secure, and accelerate the chaos.    We break down: - Why AI workloads are crushing traditional networking and security architectures  - How DPUs deliver line-rate telemetry, policy enforcement, and microsegmentation  - Where companies like NVIDIA (BlueField-3), AMD (Pensando), Intel, Marvell, Fungible, Microsoft (Azure Boost), and Cisco (Hypershield) are racing to redefine infrastructure  - Why financial institutions, hospitals, and hyperscalers are already deploying DPUs at scale  - What this means for your observability, east-west controls, and AI agent governance    The $5.5B DPU market isn’t a footnote—it’s a warning shot. If your stack isn’t built to segment, inspect, and enforce in real-time, it’s not ready for AI. And the next wave of agentic systems isn’t going to wait.

    22 min

  3. SEP 9

    Less small talk, more substance

    Everyone’s chasing generative AI for flash, but a quiet revolution is happening where the real money is: predictive AI. In this episode, F5's Lori MacVittie, Joel Moses, and Dmitry Kit dig into how a team of researchers used machine learning—not an LLM—to design a paint that passively cools buildings by up to 20 degrees. No prompts. No hallucinations. Just real-world impact through smart pattern recognition. Listen in as we unpack what this means for enterprise leaders chasing efficiency, and why your ops and sales teams should be looking for better recipes—not better word salad. It's not about generating magic. It's about discovering truth at scale.  Learn how you can stay ahead of the curve and keep your stack whole with additional insights on app security, multicloud, AI, and emerging tech:  https://www.f5.com/company/octo

    21 min

  4. SEP 2

    The perimeter has shifted

    The perimeter isn’t where you left it. Agents are on the move, APIs are on fire, and your infrastructure is about as ready for this as a fax machine is for a DDoS. In this week's episode, Lori, Joel and F5 Field CISO, Chuck Herrin, are talking guardrails—real ones—for the age of agentic AI.   Because while your dashboards were busy sipping metrics, the vendors got serious. Recent product launches show a clear pivot toward AI-specific defenses and infrastructure support like: an AI firewall, AI runtime protection, semantic observability, and AI policy and rule generation.    Turns out, stateless APIs weren’t built for recursive agents with infinite retries and zero chill. If your architecture still thinks AI means ‘autocomplete,’ you’re going to want to tune in for actionable steps to stay ahead in an AI-dominated future. It’s not just about security. It’s survival. Let’s go.

    26 min

  5. AUG 26

    AI Joel: Who owns him?

    In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Lori MacVittie, Joel Moses, and Ken Arora delve into the complex issue of ownership with respect to your AI-driven digital twin. As organizations consider the use of AI avatars and AI twins, explore the nuances of employment contracts, intellectual property, and the potential for creating AI models based on an employee's data. The discussion ranges from corporate IP ownership to legal precedents from the entertainment industry, touching on futuristic concepts like posthumous digital replicas and their ethical implications. Tune in to find out how your everyday work data could be shaping the AI models of tomorrow and who owns the rights in this evolving landscape.

    23 min

  6. AUG 19

    Old is New Again: Bandwidth will be the AI bottleneck

    AI doesn't just chew up compute—it eats your network for breakfast. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Lori MacVittie, Joel Moses, and Ken Arora dig into the pressing issues surrounding AI workloads and networking. Everyone's worried about GPUs and cooling, but nobody’s talking about the lateral east-west traffic explosion, the rise of inter-agent comms, or the operational strain on DCN fabric and interconnects. Our experts discuss the importance of upgrading data center networks to accommodate AI demands, examining the differences between training and inferencing workloads. The conversation also covers the necessity of high-performance networking, the relevance of latency, data gravity, and the potential expansion of data centers. Tune in to get valuable insights into the challenges and solutions shaping the future of AI-driven applications.

    24 min

  7. AUG 12

    Fine-tuning on a Budget

    Big models, tight budgets? No problem. In this episode of Pop Goes the stack, hosts Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses talk with Dmitry Kit from F5's AI Center of Excellence about LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation), the not-so-secret weapon for customizing LLMs without melting your GPU or your wallet. From role-specific agents to domain-aware behavior, we break down how LoRA lets you inject intelligence without retraining the entire brain. Whether you're building AI for IT ops, customer support, or anything in between, this is fine-tuning that actually scales. Learn about the benefits, risks, and practical applications of using LoRA to target specific model behavior, reduce latency, and optimize performance, all for under $1,000. Tune in to understand how LoRA can revolutionize your approach to AI and machine learning.

    21 min

  8. AUG 5

    Now Streaming: Your Status Updates

    Google decided what you really wanted wasn’t answers, it was a podcast about your question. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, Lori MacVittie, Joel Moses, and F5 Community Evangelist, Aubrey King, discuss Google's new Search Labs project featuring AI-generated audio overviews. They dive into the implications of this technology, the evolution of dashboards, and the potential of narrative-driven interfaces. The hosts explore how AI and voice interactions are shaping the future, despite the initial hiccups like a 40-second response time. Tune in to understand how narrative explanations might transform the way we interact with technology and data visualization.

    22 min

  9. JUL 29

    Securing AI Agents: Tackling the Non-Human Identity Crisis

    In this episode of 'Pop Goes the Stack,' host Lori MacVittie and co-host Joel Moses are joined by F5 Sr. Solution Architect Peter Scheffler to delve into the pressing issue of securing AI agents. The episode highlights emerging vulnerabilities as AI agents enter enterprise environments, especially in light of poor security practices like hard-coded credentials. They discuss the dynamic nature of agent identity and authorization protocols and propose potential solutions including ephemeral credentials and strict boundaries. Tune in to learn how AI agents are rewriting security rules and what you can do to protect your stack.

    23 min

  10. JUL 22

    Chasing Logic Chains: Inference tracing

    ​Dive into the intricacies of AI observability and decision-making with host Lori MacVittie and special guest Chris Hain. Lori and Chris discuss Anthropic’s open-sourced circuit tracing Python library tool and recent studies analyzing the internal workings of large language models (LLMs) during inference. They explore the growing need for advanced observability tools and the operational challenges involved in managing AI systems. From AI's decision-making complexities to the future of semantic observability, this episode is a deep dive into the often chaotic world of emerging tech.   Paper’s referenced in this episode: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.htmlhttps://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment

    22 min

  11. JUL 15

    AI Attacks: The App Security Arms Race

    Hosts Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses are joined by F5’s Field CISO Chuck Herrin to dive deep into the implications of artificial intelligence on cybersecurity. They analyze the surge in AI-driven attacks, the challenges of defending against them, and the crucial role of fundamentals and observability in modern application security strategies. Learn about the democratization of AI, the evolution of intelligent threat vectors, and the importance of integrating AI native defense in your security stack. Don't miss their insights on preparing for the future landscape of cyber threats.

    27 min

  12. JUL 8

    Multimodal Madness: The Darth Vader Debacle

    In our inaugural episode of Pop Goes the Stack, Lori MacVittie and occasional co-host, Joel Moses, dive into the wild world of multimodal AI with guest Aubrey King. They discuss Fortnite's fascinating yet problematic AI-powered Darth Vader, a multimodal NPC driven by Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash and ElevenLabs’ Flash v2.5, highlighting the technical mishaps and security pitfalls. The conversation explores the unique risks of multimodal AI in application delivery, where voice and text inputs create complex attack surfaces compared to traditional prompt injection vulnerabilities. Tune in for a blend of tech insights and entertaining anecdotes that reveal the lessons developers and companies can learn to avoid similar issues in the future when deploying cutting-edge AI technology.

    24 min
  • 12 Episodes

About

Explore the evolving world of application delivery and security. Each episode will dive into technologies shaping the future of operations, analyze emerging trends, and discuss the impacts of innovations on the tech stack.

Information

  • Creator
    F5
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    12
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2025 F5

You Might Also Like