Contrail Platform Overview
The Juniper Contrail Platform provides dynamic end-to-end networking, networking policy, and control for any cloud, any workload, and any deployment, all from a single user interface. Although the focus of this book is building a secure container network orchestrated by Kubernetes, Contrail can build virtual networks that integrate containers, VMs, and bare metal servers.
Virtual networks are a key concept in the Contrail system. Virtual networks are logical constructs implemented on top of physical networks. They are used to replace VLAN-based isolation and provide multitenancy in a virtualized data center. Each tenant or an application can have one or more virtual networks. Each virtual network is isolated from all the other virtual networks unless explicitly allowed by network policy. Virtual networks can be extended to physical networks using a gateway. Finally, virtual networks are used to build service–chaining.
As shown in Figure 1, the network operator only deals with the logical abstraction of the network, then Contrail does the heavy lifting which includes, but is not limited to, building polices, exchanging routes, and building tunnels on the physical topology.
