AI quickstart: Protecting inference with F5 Distributed Cloud and Red Hat AI

AI quickstart: Protecting inference with F5 Distributed Cloud and Red Hat AI Protecting your AI endpoints Inside the F5 Distributed Cloud API Security AI quickstart Building together Get started The adaptable enterprise: Why AI readiness is disruption readiness About the authors Shane Heroux Saurabh Agarwal Eric Ji More like this Enable intelligent insights with Red Hat Satellite MCP Server Scaling Enterprise Federated AI with Flower and Open Cluster Management Technically Speaking | Build a production-ready AI toolbox Technically Speaking | Platform engineering for AI agents Keep exploring Browse by channel Automation Artificial intelligence Open hybrid cloud Security Edge computing Infrastructure Applications Virtualization Share Earlier this year, we launched the Red Hat AI quickstart catalog , a collection of ready-to-run blueprints designed to help organizations move from talking about AI to using large language models (LLMs) to solve real-world problems. This provides systems integrators and architects with example AI solutions that Red Hat engineering has tested and streamlined for easy deployment. Once you've successfully rolled out an interactive solution on Red Hat AI , however, the next question is usually, "How do I protect this in the real world?" To help answer this, we've expanded the AI quickstarts catalog with one of our first partner-led entries: The F5 Distributed Cloud API Security AI quickstart. Most organizations have no trouble spinning up a basic chat assistant or a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) demo. The friction starts when they realize that an inference endpoint is, at its core, an API. APIs are the primary target for modern exploits. For those of us helping customers architect these systems, security concerns are often what prevent promising pilots from reaching production. This new AI quickstart, collaboratively developed by F5 and Red Hat, helps you get past that hurdle. It demonstrates how to apply enterprise-grade protection before users begin interacting with your AI models. The F5 Distributed Cloud API Security AI quickstart is a modular blueprint that integrates F5 Distributed Cloud (XC) Services with the Red Hat AI platform. It's designed to be deployed in under 90 minutes, giving you a fully functional, protected environment to demonstrate: Schema validation : So your LlamaStack or vLLM endpoints only process well-formed, authorized requests Sensitive data guardrails : Automatically detecting and redacting personally identifiable information (PII) or proprietary data before it ever leaves your environment Resource protection : Implementing rate limiting and bot defense so your GPU cycles are used by legitimate users, not malicious scrapers Hybrid flexibility : Whether your model is running on-premises or in a public cloud, the architecture remains consistent By bringing F5's decades of security expertise to an AI quickstart, we're demonstrating a reusable method for addressing many of these "Day 2" problems. The goal isn't just to kick the tires, it's to provide a predictable, reusable framework so that when a customer asks how their data will be protected, you'll have a working, demonstrable response.