Juniper Networks introduced its Contrail Edge Cloud for helping service providers deploy new revenue-generating services at the network edge. The aim is to bring a full-fledged secure cloud experience to the space- and power-constrained edge network, which includes base stations, hub sites and switching sites.
Juniper says its Contrail Edge Cloud can extend a full suite of orchestration, automation, security and analytics to the edge for supporting dynamic consumer and enterprise services in a cost and resource efficient manner.
The new Contrail Edge Cloud leverages the software-defined networking capabilities of Contrail Networking and Contrail Security with Kubernetes and OpenStack. Furthermore, it is based on Linux Foundation’s open Tungsten Fabric project.
Some highlights:
- Footprint-optimized distributed computing: Integration with Red Hat OpenStack Platform, a highly scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform, with distributed compute, leverages many of the latest OpenStack capabilities to remotely manage the lifecycle of compute nodes and virtual machines (VMs) from a centralized data center, without requiring the footprint of co-located OpenStack control plane functions in each of these remote edge sites.
- Containers for faster time to revenue: Contrail Edge Cloud will be capable of supporting Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and other Kubernetes distributions.
- Unified workflow, policy and service chaining: Contrail Networking with remote compute capabilities enables service providers to deliver a seamless network fabric between VMs, containers and bare metal servers from a single-user interface across physical and virtual environments. Contrail Networking translates abstract workflows into specific networking policies, simplifying the orchestration of virtual overlay connectivity across all environments. Fabric management capabilities automate policies and life-cycle management of each data center and edge site fabric. Contrail Networking provides connectivity and service chaining for OpenStack VM, Kubernetes containers and bare metal workloads without requiring the footprint of co-located control plane functions.
- Native security and microsegmentation: Contrail Security provides visibility, telemetry and network policy enforcement in a single unified mechanism for service providers that are increasingly deploying a mix of VMs and containers. It includes adaptive firewall policies and tag-based ability to enforce security policies across Kubernetes and OpenStack.
- Open source software-defined storage: Red Hat Ceph Storage provides massively scalable storage that runs economically on industry standard hardware and manages petabytes of data across cloud and emerging workloads.
- Machine learning-based analytics: AppFormix provides machine learning-based performance and health monitoring to give health and service insights into workloads and deployments.
- Full-featured virtualized security: cSRX and vSRX deliver an industry leading container and virtualized security instance as part of the service chain.
Juniper said it continues to contribute to the Linux Foundation’s Akraino Edge Stack project to further the open cloud initiatives.
“Service providers’ edge networks are beachfront property. As 5G and new applications such as IoT, AR/VR and connected cars all require extreme proximity to the end user, the edge will become ground zero to deploy virtualized network infrastructure, as well as to monetize new applications. Contrail Edge Cloud will greatly simplify the IT side of spinning up and managing these new services in a secure way. And what’s great is it isn’t just for network engineers. It also gives sales and marketing executives a way to get creative with agile new services, so businesses and consumers start seeing carriers as more than just connectivity providers. We are executing all of this in an incredibly small edge-friendly footprint,” stated Sally Bament, Vice President, Service Provider Marketing, Juniper Networks.
