BiB 027: Juniper Networks At NFD17 – A Platform Emerges

Juniper Networks came back for a second day at Network Field Day 17. This time around the company focused on:

* An Appformix demo showing analytics and visibility – a topic that we say is critical to the future network strategy
* Contrail diverging from OpenContrail to embrace public clouds, hybrid clouds, and Kubernetes. It aims to be a single platform to unify all network orchestration (with some companies pursuing multiple controllers)
* Contrail as the configuration engine, AppFormix as the analytics and automation layer
* Adopting P4 across its fleet as a general abstraction for forwarding packets
* Open/R on its current control plane inside devices (and contrail vRouter)

Juniper outlined its idea of how network automation will evolve:

* Day 0:  Human-Driven Automation
* Day 1:  Event-Driven Automation
* Day N: Machine-Driven Automation

Juniper also demonstrated PeerBot – a Contrail application for automating BPG configuration across dozens of routers for IXP environments. PeerBot:

* Dramatically simplifies BGP configuration
* Targets a narrow market, but this makes it useful. A general-purpose solution might struggle to be useful to specific people
* Is just one of a handful of bots that Juniper has announced. The company plans to build more bots this year