Pop Goes the Stack

What does "availability" mean in a world of AI inferencing and ever-shifting workloads? It’s no longer just about servers responding or apps being online—availability now hinges on response quality, utility, and even user perception . A fast system that delivers irrelevant or wrong answers? That’s simply unavailable to its users. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Lori MacVittie, Joel Mos...

Coding pipelines are evolving and AI agents are taking the wheel. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Joel Moses teams up with Buu Lam to dive into “vibe coding”—where tools like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot plan, build, and optimize apps faster than humans can debate lint rules.   But is faster better? While agentic AI unlocks game-changing efficiency, it also introduces new risks: API...

Hi, Pop Goes the Stack listeners! The holiday season is here, and we’re taking a short break to recharge, enjoy time with loved ones, and maybe step away from our stacks (just for a bit). Don’t worry—we’ll be back after New Year’s with more sharp insights, expert takes, and our signature snark to help you navigate the fast-paced world of application delivery and security. In the meantime, why not...

The web we built—a tangle of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, APIs, and SEO quirks—has always been messy. But with AI agents and real-time apps now consuming the web as data, that mess becomes a liability. Firecrawl is one of the new tools reshaping how apps see and ingest web content, turning web pages into structured JSON, markdown, screenshots—everything you need for your agents to behave intelligently. ...

Uptime used to mean reliability. But in the LLM era, five nines just means your liar is always available. Real reliability now includes correctness and that means probing models in real time with prompts that have known answers. When those slip, your delivery fabric has to reroute before customers find out.  In this episode F5's Lori MacVittie, Joel Moses, and returning guest Garland Moore dig int...

Agents are popping up everywhere: tiny bots spinning up for a task, then dying off. They shouldn’t carry long-lived credentials any more than you carry a master key everywhere you go. What if each agent got a just-for-this-mission credential—scoped, temporary, context-aware, and gone when its task ends? That’s ephemeral authentication.  In this episode, F5's Lori MacVittie, Joel Moses, and special...

Hi everyone! This is Lori MacVittie, host of Pop Goes the Stack. This holiday week, we’re pressing pause to recharge, spend time with loved ones, and maybe even step away from our stacks for a bit (gasp!). But don’t worry—we’ll be back soon with more: ✅ Sharp insights into emerging tech ✅ Expert takes on application delivery & security ✅ And, of course, our signature snark Missed an episode...

The 2025 API Threat Report is out, and shocker: we’re still getting wrecked by injection, data leaks, and BOLA. That’s Broken Object Level Authorization, for those of you keeping score at home. And here’s the kicker—95% of these attacks are coming through authenticated sessions. Translation: the bad guys aren’t breaking in through the side door, they’re waltzing in with a valid badge and looting t...

Remember when APIs were quiet little endpoints that waited politely for humans to click buttons? Yeah, that’s over. Now you’ve got swarms of LLM agents duct-taping tools together like caffeinated interns on Red Bull, firing off recursive calls at 3 a.m., and cheerfully melting your infrastructure while insisting everything is “working as intended.” Observability dashboards are screaming, rate limi...

Here's the newest bright idea in AI: don’t pay humans to evaluate model outputs, let another model do it. This is the “LLM-as-a-judge” craze. Models not just spitting answers but grading them too, like a student slipping themselves the answer key. It sounds efficient, until you realize you’ve built the academic equivalent of letting someone’s cousin sit on their jury. The problem is called prefere...

We’re on a brief hiatus. But don’t worry—we’ll be back shortly with more sharp insights, expert takes, and of course Lori's signature snark to help you navigate the ever-evolving world of application delivery and security.

A North Carolina musician was arrested after using AI to generate fake bands and bots to stream their songs—racking up over a billion plays and pocketing $10 million in fraudulent royalties. It’s the first U.S. case of AI-driven music streaming fraud, and it’s less about music than it is about bots exploiting business models.  For enterprises, the lesson is simple: if you treat all traffic as legi...

Prompt injection isn't some new exotic hack. It’s what happens when you throw your admin console and your users into the same text box and pray the intern doesn’t find the keys to production. Vendors keep chanting about “guardrails” like it’s a Harry Potter spell, but let’s be real—if your entire security model is “please don’t say ignore previous instructions,” you’re not doing security, you’re d...

Your APIs were designed for humans and orderly machines: clean request, tidy response, stateless, rate-limited. Then along came agentic AI—recursive, stateful, jittery little things that retry forever, chain calls together, and dream up new query paths at 3 a.m.   The result? Your APIs start looking less like infrastructure and more like trauma patients. Rate limits collapse. Monitoring floods. Se...

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 h...

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.   ...

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 r...

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...

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...

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 f...

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 withou...

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...

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 a...

​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...

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...