AI traffic management: Load balancing vs model routing

AI traffic looks like an API call, but it behaves nothing like traditional API traffic. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Lori MacVittie, Joel Moses, and Scott Calvet unpack why classic load balancing assumptions break down for inference and agentic workloads, and what “model routing” needs to become if we’re serious about performance, cost, and reliability.
The core distinction is simple: traditional load balancing mostly optimizes distribution and availability under the assumption that requests are broadly interchangeable. Model routing has to inspect intent. A short prompt can…