About F5 BIG-IP CNE products

Types of F5 BIG-IP Cloud-Native Edition products

There are two types of products in F5 BIG-IP Cloud-Native Edition:

  • Infrastructure

  • Cloud-native network function (CNF)

F5 BIG-IP Cloud-Native Edition products

F5 BIG-IP Cloud-Native Edition includes the following products, which are sometimes abbreviated for improved readability:

Product

Abbreviation

Type

BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes Cloud-Native Edition

BNK

Infrastructure

BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager Cloud-Native Edition

AFM

CNF

BIG-IP Carrier-Grade NAT Cloud-Native Edition

CGNAT

CNF

BIG-IP Domain Name Service Cloud-Native Edition

DNS

CNF

BIG-IP Policy Enforcement Manager Cloud-Native Edition

PEM

CNF

Types of BNK instances

You can install two types of BNK instances:

Type

Description

BNK (Host)

All pods in the BNK instance are installed on host nodes.

BNK (DPU)

Each pod in the TMM (data-plane) workload is installed on its own NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU node. All other pods in the BNK instance are installed on host nodes.

BNK modes

You can install a BNK instance in one of two modes:

Mode

Description

Deployment

The TMM workload is a deployment. In this mode, you can install one or more BNK instances per cluster.

Daemon set

The TMM workload is a daemon set. In this mode, you can install only one BNK instance per cluster.