Juniper Apstra
Transcript
(dramatic music) >> Hey, how's it going? It's Keith Townsend, Principal of the CTO Advisor. You're watching The Capstone, one of our favorite projects in the CTO Advisor hybrid infrastructure. I'm a network geek by heart. So when Juniper reached out and talked to us about network orchestration and the CTO Advisor hybrid infrastructure taking VXLan and some Cisco 9k's and Juniper 10k's, and deploying blueprints as if the underlay that difference between a Cisco switch and a Juniper 10k switch really didn't exist. I don't mean the speeds and feeds.
There's quite a difference between a Juniper 10k switch and a Cisco 9k switch. I'm talking about configuration, taking this mindset that we have in the virtualization and Cloud world, and applying it in a way that I hadn't considered to the private Cloud or the private network. We're not going to give away all of the research. If you want to check out our research, click on the link below, read the report. High level, here's the scenario I think we could all relate to from an executive perspective.
You have your traditional network environment, which has been rapidly changing over the past few years from a design perspective, but not necessarily from an operational perspective. We have our network and switch configuration, which has been traditionally this static. We'll go to a command line or we'll go to a a vendor specific tool to make configuration changes, hope for the best, roll back manually if there's a need to roll back, and kind of operate in this network silo world that we've operated before. The Cloud has changed that model.
We have the concept of VPCs and Amazon AWS. We have the concept of virtual private networks, and both Google and Azure, where we do the configuration and configuration management, orchestration of the configuration via these Cloud control planes. But we have these applications that we want to build and maintain in our private data center that have the attributes of Cloud, but ride on network infrastructure that we manage. No vendor has come along and built us a control plane that we can take our traditional applications, like SAP, VMWare, et cetera, and then build Cloud native applications on, and then give to our SRE persona to manage all the environments.
If I have a SRE and I want them to troubleshoot an application sitting in my Cloud native infrastructure, what tooling do I give them to look in both the network configuration from a lowest level that they need to see to the let's say we're using vSphere for our private Cloud to the vSphere configuration? Juniper promises to solve a portion of that problem with us using Apstra, whether we're using Cisco for the underlay, Juniper for the underlay or Sonic, they're promising to orchestrate and give us insight into that underlay and virtual overlay that we hadn't had before in tooling for the private data center.
Hmm, we put that to test. It was quite the adventure. Over a few months, we took Apstra, deployed it, created blueprints for both the Juniper 10k's that they sent us and then took those same concepts and deployed them to 9k's and kind of tested this idea that we can abstract the way the underlay and manage it similar to how we manage any other virtualized environment. What was the outcomes? What did we find? Well for that, you'll have to check out the report.
It was great work from the V admin team. You want to learn more about the CTO Advisor? You can follow me on the web @CTOAdvisor is the Twitter handle. You can ask me any question you like about the project or our approach to the project. com. And of course you can visit the link below to learn more about Juniper Apstra, which Juniper Network Apstra, who sponsored this excellent proof of concept. Until the next CTL advisory video, talk to you online.
