Chris Lewis, Independent Industry Analyst of host of Get Connected

Get Connected Podcast Episode 6: Power Cloud Automation

Get Connected Network AutomationTelco Cloud
Chris Lewis Headshot
Title slide showing drawings of a woman and a man in front of a podcast microphone. Text says, “GET CONNECTED with Chris Lewis,” and “Embracing the Power of Cloud Automation.”

Bring powerful automation to your edge, telco, and IT data center clouds.

Listen as James Kelly from Juniper Networks describes how Juniper's enterprise and service provider customers have harnessed automation to bring the underlay and overlay together to deploy harmonic, multi-vendor cloud network.

Show more

You’ll learn

  • Ways service providers are deploying clouds today

  • Why 5G is driving modernizing of telco cloud initiatives

  • About Juniper solutions Apstra (fabric manager) and Contrail (virtual networking management)

Who is this for?

Network Professionals Business Leaders

Host

Chris Lewis Headshot
Chris Lewis
Independent Industry Analyst of host of Get Connected

Guest speakers

James Kelly Headshot
James Kelly
Sr. Director of Product Management, Cloud Ready Data

Transcript

0:00 [Music]

0:03 get connected

0:06 you're listening to get connected

0:08 [Music]

0:09 thanks for joining us

0:13 in this series we discuss the various

0:16 issues shaping your industry how the

0:18 changes in supplier ecosystems impact

0:20 the way you work on a daily basis how

0:23 your customers consume the services you

0:25 create and how the industry as a whole

0:27 steps up to the demands of the digital

0:29 marketplace let's get connected

0:36 hello listener let's get connected

0:38 [Music]

0:41 my name is chris lewis

0:43 by day i'm an independent industry

0:46 analyst by night as you should know by

0:48 now i'm a podcaster

0:53 welcome to get connected where we delve

0:56 into the issues shaping the networking

0:58 industry and the experiences we all

1:01 benefit from by being better connected

1:05 in this episode we're talking about

1:07 power cloud automation how to bring

1:10 powerful automation to your edge telco

1:14 and i.t data center clouds

1:16 to enable simplified value-driven

1:19 operations

1:20 in the hot seat alongside me today is

1:23 the senior director of product

1:25 management from juniper's cloud ready

1:27 data center group mr james kelly welcome

1:31 james tell us a bit about your role

1:33 great to be here chris so i've been a

1:35 juniper for a long time 15 years now and

1:38 all kinds of different roles and as you

1:39 said i'm i'm currently in the the cloud

1:42 and data center business group but when

1:44 i started off my journey back in 2006 i

1:47 started off much more technically

1:48 focused as a developer advocate

1:51 and went through roles

1:53 as various specialists focus on cloud

1:55 and devops

1:56 kind of growing from an engineer

1:59 to do more business development i worked

2:01 on such things as the contrail

2:03 acquisition and more recently worked on

2:06 the abstract acquisition but through all

2:08 that time yeah i've spent time in the

2:09 marketing teams

2:11 and uh it's been it's been a long but

2:14 very exciting journey of lots of

2:16 different positions and lots of

2:17 different exciting technology right

2:19 things are always changing in technology

2:20 that's one of the reasons why i love

2:23 working in this field and that's

2:25 certainly true of

2:26 of cloud and automation today

2:29 and it's great isn't it because the the

2:31 issue of of all these topics coming

2:33 together we often talk about now the

2:34 collision of technologies coming from

2:36 the data center the enterprise and the

2:38 service provider you know having had

2:40 that experience in all those different

2:42 if you like more basic engineering

2:43 levels and then marketing and having a

2:45 taste of all the different areas really

2:47 helps you shape your thinking of

2:49 bringing what is a very diverse set of

2:51 services and technologies to bear in

2:53 this emerging cloud environment yes

2:55 hopefully that's the case

2:57 so james cloud has evolved from a dc

3:01 technology through network and

3:03 infrastructure service how are your

3:05 service providers deploying cloud today

3:08 yeah so in terms of juniper's cloud

3:10 business we sell to cloud providers we

3:12 sell to enterprises and we sell to these

3:14 network and communications service

3:16 providers we just call them service

3:18 providers most of the time for short but

3:20 you know your cable close your telcos

3:23 of course you know over time we know

3:25 that data centers have you know trended

3:28 from more centralized to more

3:29 distributed of course today the level of

3:32 automation in data centers has

3:34 skyrocketed

3:36 [Music]

3:37 things like moving from virtualized to

3:39 containerized

3:41 i guess there's a confluence of the the

3:43 application teams and the operations

3:45 teams underneath it

3:47 and in the operations teams

3:49 among the infrastructure silos those

3:51 things kind of coming together this they

3:53 can be orchestrated together

3:55 and in the context of our service

3:57 provider customers that you asked about

4:00 the biggest thing that's happening in so

4:02 far as the the data center space for sps

4:04 today

4:05 is you know 5g is driving a lot of

4:09 modernization of their telco cloud

4:11 initiatives and of course these telco

4:13 clouds are also distributed um all the

4:16 way out to to the radio networks frankly

4:18 i think as you rightly point out there

4:20 you know your your customers are moving

4:22 from from cloud to multi-cloud to

4:24 virtualized you know into the world of

4:26 containers and kubernetes

4:28 how do you contrast what's happening uh

4:30 with your enterprise customers because

4:32 juniper doesn't just cover the sp as you

4:35 said it covers the enterprise side it

4:36 covers the data center so on how do you

4:38 contrast what's happening with the

4:40 enterprises and the service providers

4:42 where that transition within the service

4:44 provider in particular

4:46 is

4:47 certainly perceived to be more slowly

4:49 developing than in the enterprise market

4:51 so the

4:53 the thing that i mentioned i guess i get

4:55 virtualized to containerized we've seen

4:57 that

4:59 that evolution happened more quickly

5:01 in the enterprise space

5:04 so that transition is absolutely being

5:06 driven by 5g but if you go back you know

5:08 it's already seven years now that we've

5:10 got these open source projects like

5:12 kubernetes that are really dramatically

5:14 changing the way applications run in

5:17 data centers and let's you know admit

5:19 for a second that the name of the game

5:21 and the whole purpose of data centers is

5:23 to run applications

5:24 right enterprises have all different

5:26 kinds of applications

5:28 but primarily their endpoint you know

5:31 like server type of applications and

5:33 those have been refactored into

5:35 containers and into different micro

5:38 services of course and the systems like

5:40 kubernetes and its rise and prevalence

5:43 have facilitated all of that

5:46 and along with that there's various you

5:47 know infrastructure changes software

5:49 defined infrastructure changes

5:50 underneath kubernetes that support it as

5:53 well as operational changes on top of it

5:56 in the devops space but if you look at

5:58 how that happened for enterprise

6:01 they were able to adopt that quite

6:03 quickly

6:04 modernizing you know breaking off some

6:06 of their applications and modernizing

6:08 those into that cloud native uh so to

6:10 speak environment first and foremost we

6:12 use cloud native and kubernetes centric

6:15 almost uh synonymously of course because

6:17 the cloud native computing foundation

6:19 was really centered around kubernetes

6:22 and when you look at how service

6:24 providers have adopted that of course

6:27 they didn't have the opportunity to

6:28 easily break off chunks of their

6:30 applications like enterprises did

6:32 and start to modernize them right away

6:34 right service providers kind of

6:37 coalesce around standards bodies and

6:40 organizations that you know talk

6:42 together and figure out what we're going

6:44 to do in the 3gpp space what are we

6:46 going to do for

6:47 for 5g what are we going to do for our

6:50 iran initiatives

6:52 for these next generations of

6:53 infrastructures so they tend to be more

6:56 on this cadence of you know 3g 4g 5g etc

7:00 and those present natural steps for them

7:03 to modernize

7:05 and so

7:06 um with the rise of 5g and kubernetes

7:08 having already been on the scene this

7:10 was the natural next step for service

7:13 providers right to move from virtualized

7:16 to containerized from

7:18 things like virtual machine management

7:20 systems that had been used to

7:23 orchestrate the virtual network

7:24 functions in the 4g era to things like

7:27 kubernetes to manage the containerized

7:30 network functions of the 5g era and that

7:33 transition is still very much going on

7:36 um so they're they're straddling both

7:38 worlds as as enterprises are too legacy

7:40 doesn't ever just

7:42 you know go away but the the other

7:45 challenge that service providers face is

7:47 they don't necessarily have client

7:48 server types of applications that are

7:50 all endpoint micro services as they're

7:53 refactoring their their network and

7:55 their security functions these things

7:56 are often of course waypoint services

7:59 right that are processing traffic um for

8:03 for mobile subscribers for broadband

8:05 subscribers and for business subscribers

8:07 to do all sorts of things but because

8:09 they're they're waypoint services

8:11 because they're also packet processing

8:13 in many cases they also have high

8:15 performance high availability

8:19 all sorts of additional

8:21 requirements

8:23 and a standard of excellence they must

8:26 meet in terms of scale performance and

8:28 reliability

8:29 that uh that don't always need to be

8:31 engineered into uh enterprise systems

8:34 the same way no sure what is really

8:35 interesting about this is that you know

8:37 the the way they had control over the

8:39 environment in the past seems to have

8:41 gone

8:42 you know and they now have to take it

8:43 allowance of what's going on in the data

8:45 center and of course we used to have

8:46 these very centralized data centers but

8:48 now it's been dispersed and distributed

8:50 out to the edge and 5g as you rightly

8:52 say is a major change in that respect

8:54 because it's making the service

8:56 providers the telcos think about not

8:57 only the traditional endpoints and as

8:59 you said they're getting services out to

9:01 those endpoints but the increasing the

9:02 billions of endpoints that you know many

9:05 people at juniper point out are evolving

9:07 as we move into the worlds of iot so

9:09 we've gone from connecting buildings and

9:11 people now to the things and devices and

9:14 therefore i think the point that it that

9:16 came clear from what you just said

9:18 is that the traffic becomes really

9:19 important and in many ways the telecom

9:21 industry is to focus on its inner

9:23 workings and not on what it actually

9:25 delivers for its for its end customers

9:27 or in this case it's partners because

9:29 it's not just about the telcos

9:30 themselves it's about who sits within

9:32 that ecosystem and i think that i think

9:34 that was is that how you see 5g really

9:36 changing the vision from the the service

9:39 provider side yeah um i would agree with

9:41 all of that i mean i'd add also that uh

9:44 you know with 5g and with this

9:46 more multi-cloud era enterprises moving

9:48 to multi-cloud i think people understand

9:50 what the term implies surprise hybrid

9:52 cloud and the use of multiple clouds

9:55 well with service providers you know

9:57 this is all still true certainly in the

9:59 sense of their i.t clouds

10:01 but in their sense of their their telco

10:03 clouds there's a wider distribution

10:06 of multiple compute clusters right

10:08 they'll have much more of this spread

10:11 out across many remote sites many more i

10:14 guess you could say geographically

10:16 centralized or main sites and some of

10:18 these will be running on their own

10:20 on-premises owned infrastructure

10:22 as well as some of the hyperscaler you

10:25 know cloud infrastructure so there's

10:26 hybrid sense in that in that

10:29 sense of transformation of how things

10:30 are working too exactly is that that

10:32 ecosystem change of course is as you

10:34 rightly say it's not just about the

10:36 telcos it's about partnering with as

10:38 those hyperscalers bring things towards

10:40 the edge as you as a as a provider of

10:43 infrastructure and services to them

10:44 bring services to the table so the

10:46 management of it and imagine all of

10:48 these moving parts and let's face it as

10:50 we have

10:51 up to 100 billion moving parts in the

10:53 future or

10:54 building connected things

10:56 hit in the market then we've just got to

10:58 make sure this this efficiency is there

11:00 to deliver

11:02 i'd like to change directly a little bit

11:04 and

11:05 you mentioned that you were involved i

11:06 think in your introduction both in the

11:08 acquisition of comtrail and indeed

11:10 abstract so can we turn to abstra

11:12 juniper added apps to the portfolio of

11:14 products

11:16 what problem does abstract solve and why

11:18 is it important to the customers good

11:20 question and uh happy to pivot to to

11:22 talk about some juniper-centric stuff

11:24 and and tie it back to those

11:26 introductory remarks so

11:28 to answer the question you know quickly

11:30 and simply

11:32 abstra is a

11:34 a fabric management system

11:36 over

11:37 switching fabrics inside of the data

11:39 center now that's sort of a generic

11:41 description of it you know appstore kind

11:43 of made its name and the reason why it

11:45 was very famous

11:47 was

11:48 they the the abstract company when it

11:50 was founded in 2015 they drove a trend

11:52 towards intent-based networking and they

11:55 also had a maniacal focus on usability

11:58 across multiple vendors with a common

12:01 experience so the workflows are

12:03 abstracted across different vendors and

12:06 the fact that they're providing this

12:08 multi-vendor fabric management system

12:10 for different vendors of switches right

12:12 whether it be juniper cisco arista and

12:15 so on

12:16 under one operational umbrella for our

12:20 users our customers

12:22 that's really how they they made their

12:23 names fake and that intent-based

12:25 networking is really the term that

12:27 points to this

12:28 abstraction this facilitation

12:31 of these workflows um to an intent based

12:34 level so less prescriptive step-by-step

12:37 less oriented towards the actual

12:39 configuration and cli

12:41 of the individual devices right the

12:44 fleet of switches that it's managing

12:47 and it does this on a fabric by fabric

12:48 basis

12:50 and

12:50 you're right i said i worked on the

12:52 abstract acquisition

12:53 but one of the reasons why i had the

12:55 opportunity to do that is because

12:57 insofar as product managing contrail

13:01 i i said i mentioned worked on that

13:03 acquisition too

13:04 uh contrail when we first acquired it

13:07 and when it started out its life in 2013

13:10 it was really focused on

13:11 software-defined networking

13:13 for virtual machine management

13:15 orchestration systems namely openstack

13:18 and

13:19 we open sourced that i mean juniper open

13:21 source that product it became very very

13:25 uh well known

13:27 and well adopted

13:29 in the openstack space as a software

13:31 defined networking solution and as

13:33 kubernetes came on the scene we

13:35 introduced it for that as well we looked

13:38 at and dabbled in supporting you know

13:40 vsphere

13:41 but over time as contrail became a point

13:44 of control

13:45 in the data center for our customers we

13:48 realized that we wanted to

13:50 you know add in support for switching

13:53 fabric automation and management

13:56 and so we built that

13:57 as a company into contrail and what we

14:00 realized over time was that

14:03 we would

14:04 be better off for our own internal

14:06 endeavors like from a standpoint of

14:08 engineering testing code quality and

14:11 velocity if we had broken that apart and

14:14 didn't build it in contrail we also

14:16 found that the switching management even

14:18 from a user's perspective for service

14:20 providers and enterprises was best left

14:23 outside of contrail in a separate

14:25 uncoupled piece of software where these

14:28 things can work better together but

14:29 don't necessarily need to be integrated

14:32 there's an interesting point of contrast

14:34 here to like cisco aci for example

14:38 the way that you know cisco has built

14:41 aci their their flagship piece of

14:43 software for data center operations

14:46 they really do have everything under one

14:48 roof in terms of managing multiple

14:50 fabrics you know open stack

14:53 kubernetes and whatnot and we found that

14:56 in taking that approach it was a bridge

14:58 too far for customers and like i said

15:00 even internally it's just it's better to

15:03 have

15:03 separate solutions that the customers

15:05 can choose

15:07 based on their own merits and have a

15:10 company you know that has these

15:12 different pieces of software as products

15:14 but allows customers to use them without

15:17 having to present this monolithic

15:19 solution right without having to force

15:21 the customer to eat all of it

15:23 so with abstra and contrail right we we

15:26 deprecated all of the fabric management

15:28 stuff in contrail we were looking how to

15:30 rebuild that separately

15:32 and

15:33 the acquisition of appstore just

15:35 dramatically accelerated that strategy

15:37 of course and at the same time we're

15:39 able to do things like multi-vendor

15:41 which is something that juniper's

15:43 actually been pretty committed to in a

15:44 lot of ways

15:45 um so it was a really exciting

15:47 acquisition to work on i bet it was and

15:49 i think you touched on several really

15:51 important points there which is that you

15:53 know from a vendor point of view in the

15:55 let's say perhaps in the more

15:56 hardware-centric view of the world in

15:57 the past you of course tried to tie

15:59 people in and it was easier to tie

16:01 people in but actually as we move into

16:03 this more software-centric uh

16:05 nature of the bit of the beast shall we

16:07 say that actually bringing the right

16:09 pieces into it and managing it

16:10 orchestrating it all together

16:12 and thinking about it from the point of

16:14 view of the customer whether that's an

16:15 enterprise or a service provider or a

16:18 data center provider and actually

16:19 allowing them to build on what they

16:21 already have and perhaps even their

16:22 internal expertise you know we spend a

16:24 lot of time talking about the

16:25 technologies and the different vendors

16:27 in there but of course the actual people

16:29 that do that run these things within the

16:30 organizations often will drive the way

16:33 that this evolves so yeah very very

16:34 important point to bring out that um

16:37 that whole point about the the

16:38 multi-vendor nature of it uh and

16:40 actually giving the customer the choice

16:41 and actually managing these moving parts

16:43 as we go forward

16:46 so appstra manages the the fabric

16:50 and contrail manages the overlay in the

16:52 virtual networking

16:54 i think you touched upon this already

16:55 but are they standalone products or are

16:58 they

16:59 working together or are they moving

17:00 towards each other how would you

17:01 describe those two things moving

17:04 together yeah so

17:06 uh a great question and point of clarity

17:08 there you know in so far as evolving

17:11 contrail i talked a little bit about its

17:13 history just so i could tee up um the

17:15 logic behind us acquiring appstra

17:18 these products are today completely

17:21 independent in the sense that there's no

17:23 dependency of one on the other

17:26 and in fact there's no dependency

17:28 of using these products not just with

17:30 each other but also on the juniper

17:31 hardware

17:33 to reemphasize a point that you just

17:35 made

17:36 when you look at what we've done to to

17:39 decouple these products there's also you

17:41 know reasons and

17:43 areas where we have the opportunity to

17:45 reintegrate them

17:47 and that actually is an interesting

17:48 place to talk about for

17:51 for service providers and some of the

17:52 use cases that it benefits to have these

17:54 things integrated

17:56 but

17:57 perhaps what i'll mention first is

18:00 with contrail

18:02 having deprecated the fabric management

18:04 piece one of the things i mentioned is

18:06 that when we built contrail from the

18:08 get-go control networking we focused on

18:11 openstack first

18:13 well when we were looking to rationalize

18:16 contrail and to optimize it what we also

18:19 knew around this time is that our

18:21 enterprise customers and our service

18:23 provides customers were on this

18:24 transformative journey towards

18:26 kubernetes and cloud native and that we

18:28 needed a software-defined networking

18:30 product that was kubernetes first and

18:33 openstack second instead of the way that

18:35 we had kind of developed contrail was

18:37 very open stack centric so openstack

18:39 first so to speak in terms of its use

18:41 cases that it addressed in kubernetes

18:42 second so we flipped that on its head

18:45 and we spent the last 18 months at

18:48 juniper

18:49 redeveloping contrail from the ground up

18:52 in terms of its control plane to be all

18:54 kubernetes native so one of the exciting

18:56 things about this is we've

18:58 gotten deep into kubernetes and we've

19:01 made contrail so much more accessible in

19:03 doing this too one of the

19:05 challenges that our contrail users have

19:08 always had is that if you were looking

19:11 to use it for openstack you needed to

19:13 have your own hardware you know

19:14 openstack is an infrastructure as a

19:16 service system whereas kubernetes you

19:18 know you can run it on your laptop like

19:20 minicube you can run it on the public

19:22 cloud where you have you know on-demand

19:24 elastic and disposable

19:26 infrastructure

19:28 and so now you have the ability to

19:31 to run control with kubernetes and you

19:32 have the ease of deploying it on your

19:35 laptop or on the public cloud obviously

19:36 you can play it on bare metal too

19:38 but um we've rebuilt contrail as an

19:41 extension of kubernetes

19:43 we're getting ready to release that

19:46 version it's a version 22.1 um short for

19:50 2022 first quarter that's how our

19:52 versioning works

19:54 and and yeah so we've been on this

19:56 really exciting journey with contrail

19:58 and completely revamped it at the same

20:01 time as when we we did this abstract

20:03 acquisition so we're now set up for a

20:06 really exciting future where we've got

20:08 a

20:09 fabulously modern lightweight

20:12 purpose-built contrail

20:14 for kubernetes networking to still

20:16 support openstack networking of course

20:18 by the way and we've got appstra which

20:20 is you know

20:22 just killing it in terms of winning

20:23 business right now for juniper switching

20:25 and for juniper fabric operations

20:28 because of the things i talked about the

20:30 fact that it's really easy it's intent

20:32 driven it's multi-vendor so you know

20:35 certainly our customers often do have

20:37 switches from other vendors the ability

20:39 to have one

20:41 point of control and one piece of

20:42 software that they can train on and

20:44 learn

20:45 for those different switching fabrics is

20:47 is very exciting to them and unique in

20:49 the industry

20:51 and then you know to close the loop and

20:54 come all the way back to your question

20:55 about how are abstract and contrail

20:58 evolving together in a sense

21:01 well for service providers

21:03 one of the things that they're doing in

21:05 their kubernetes clusters is they've

21:07 also got

21:09 workloads that need

21:11 sriov

21:13 that's single root i o virtualization

21:16 high performance networking needs which

21:18 means that they cannot use the contrail

21:22 v router which is our forwarding plane

21:23 they effectively bypass it in favor of

21:26 additional

21:27 performance out of their their network

21:29 interface card

21:30 and when they do that

21:33 the virtual network of that server of

21:35 course needs to be plumbed into the

21:38 switching fabric right just like a bare

21:40 metal server would if you have a bare

21:42 metal server and it's got some workload

21:43 on it and it needs to take part in the

21:45 same virtual networks as all of your

21:48 containers and your virtual machines

21:50 that contrail is is networking

21:53 well you know

21:54 appstra is really the system that

21:57 manages those virtual networks in the

21:58 switching fabric and so it's also doing

22:01 that for the s or iov connected

22:03 workloads whether they're virtual

22:05 machines or whether they're containers

22:06 for example and this is a natural point

22:09 of integration between contrail and

22:11 abstra

22:12 to effectively manage the

22:14 the overlay networks that are in the

22:16 switching fabric or evpn vxlan

22:19 overlays with the contrail managed

22:22 overlays in the world of a kubernetes

22:24 cluster and it's created the whole the

22:27 whole environment especially if we move

22:29 it to a service provider perspective you

22:31 know the those flows and putting we talk

22:34 about slices in the in the 5g world

22:36 where we're dedicating infrastructure to

22:38 particular tasks but actually this all

22:40 of this both the the the controller and

22:42 app store then also needs to feed up

22:44 into the other systems into my my

22:46 favorite area of bss oss and itms and of

22:49 course devops in that changing

22:50 environment how are you seeing your

22:52 customers

22:53 look at that effectively bringing

22:55 everything we've talked about together

22:57 to deliver this more powerful this what

22:59 we talked at the very top this cloud

23:01 automation the power of cloud automation

23:03 yeah that's a really exciting topic too

23:06 when you talk about higher order

23:07 automation systems like those

23:09 b slash oss systems when you talk about

23:11 devops and the need for higher order

23:13 automation you think about starts to put

23:15 together the picture of the full stack

23:17 right you you refer to it as like

23:19 underlay an overlay of like abstra

23:21 managing the switching fabric and it's

23:23 the fabric

23:25 automation insofar as the hardware

23:27 switching fabric and then contrail

23:30 managing the workload orchestration

23:32 system on top but of course yeah there's

23:34 all of these higher order operational

23:36 tools for service providers and

23:38 enterprises on top of that

23:41 and you mentioned devops one of the

23:42 interesting trends that both enterprises

23:44 and service providers are also getting

23:47 pulled into i would say more on the

23:49 service provider front but led by

23:51 enterprise in the same way that

23:53 enterprises led the kubernetes adoption

23:56 and service providers kind of saw all of

23:58 the the transition from openstack to

24:00 kubernetes from virtualized to

24:01 containerize

24:03 the service providers are also seeing

24:04 this transition in the enterprise from

24:07 server administration and more manual

24:09 based administration to automated

24:12 operations

24:13 and devops and with that you know one of

24:16 the most enabling technology

24:20 technology underpinnings i guess you

24:21 could say for devops is infrastructure

24:23 is code

24:24 and kubernetes lends itself very well to

24:27 doing this what we've been focused on

24:29 with appstra and contrail is that when

24:31 you're actually automating your

24:33 switching fabric or when you're

24:34 automating your networking for your

24:36 kubernetes cluster that you also have

24:38 the ability to take these

24:40 software-defined networking systems

24:43 and drive them as code right because

24:45 they are software defined infrastructure

24:47 and if you've got some other

24:48 infrastructure like your servers or your

24:50 kubernetes cluster itself

24:53 and you're setting that up and you're

24:54 setting up your applications

24:56 as code then you want to do that in sync

24:59 with all of your infrastructure as well

25:02 and of course

25:04 that gets into the benefits of all of

25:06 the site reliability

25:08 engineering the sre benefits

25:11 that accrue from infrastructure as code

25:14 so

25:14 what this means in simple terms is that

25:17 you know things like abstract and things

25:19 like contrail

25:21 they are intent driven they are

25:23 declarative

25:24 in their configuration and they do lend

25:27 themselves very well to infrastructure

25:28 as code in fact with contrail being

25:31 refactored to be kubernetes native

25:34 because kubernetes

25:35 is often you know consumed through the

25:38 kube ctl in its first forms of people

25:41 getting used to it and then configured

25:44 all through code

25:46 we actually have this adjacent product

25:48 called contrail pipelines i shouldn't

25:50 really call it a product it's a it's a

25:52 feature add-on of control networking

25:54 that allows it to be driven completely

25:56 through a

25:57 continuous integration continuous

25:58 deployment a ci cd pipeline and totally

26:01 as code so yes juniper is absolutely

26:04 doing things in this space we're

26:06 absolutely integrating through the

26:08 product apis with higher order systems

26:11 whether those things are chat up systems

26:14 incident management sorts of systems to

26:17 to reference your itsm systems and

26:19 working with system integrators and oss

26:23 bss vendors to build the integration

26:26 between our network automation systems

26:28 and their

26:29 wider purview of automating the entire

26:32 you know 5g solution let's say for a

26:34 service provider

26:36 james i think that is a great way to

26:38 draw together the little journey that

26:39 we've just been on from from what this

26:41 cloud automation is looking at appstore

26:43 and contrail and then how 5g is changing

26:46 it and bringing it together under that

26:48 story of how we need to be thinking more

26:50 about the way code is driven and the way

26:52 we develop things and not be obsessed

26:54 with some of the former if you are if

26:56 you like compartmentalization

26:58 of different technologies so james it's

27:00 been an absolute pleasure having you on

27:01 get connected thanks for joining us

27:03 great to be here chris

27:06 so there you have it listener the vast

27:08 experience that james brings to the

27:09 table from working across engineering in

27:12 different areas within the juniper

27:13 environment up in the acquisition of

27:15 abstract and comtrail but most

27:17 importantly bringing the story together

27:20 how the service provider environment is

27:22 changing

27:23 to bring together the benefits of

27:25 automation at all those levels from the

27:27 underlying fabric the underlay to the

27:29 overlay and then upwards and outwards

27:32 into the operational systems

27:34 environments the bss environments and of

27:36 course that new area of devops which is

27:38 helping to shape the future of the

27:40 service provider industry

27:44 now all the remains is a few thank yous

27:46 thank you to juniper for the opportunity

27:49 to dig into this subject of power cloud

27:51 automation and thank you to you too for

27:54 listening i look forward to talking to

27:56 you again soon

27:59 you've been listening to get connected

28:02 you've heard from us now we'd love to

28:04 hear from you

28:05 tell us what you think via twitter using

28:08 the handle at juniper networks

28:11 and if you like what you've heard

28:12 remember to tell your colleagues and

28:14 friends thanks for listening to get

28:17 connected

Show more