Juniper is a modern project that has proven its ability to deliver quality customer support. It offers some wonderful pricing plans to fit your budget and they have great flexibility when it comes to integration with other third-party products. Juniper has an integrated tool set up that allows you to take advantage of your existing organization and it’s easy to implement Juniper on top of the existing structure of the organization.
When it comes to network operating systems, Juniper isn’t exactly new, it’s been around since 1996 — but it doesn’t have quite as much visibility as Cisco or HP once did. However, having sold more than $2 billion in revenue worldwide last year, and attracted a lot more attention thanks to its IPO earlier this year. Juniper definitely seems like it could become one of the biggest players in this space again, especially if it can continue increasing growth at its steady rate over time Apstra is envisioned to be an intent-based network. If a Juniper customer has a Junos router, Juniper’s intent-based networking software will use that router’s configuration to determine how best to connect to the customer’s requirements.
If you are thinking about using intent-based networking in production houses as well, I would recommend you read through my post on designing and deploying intent-based networks.
What is Intent-Based Networking?
In this day and age, it’s important to understand what an intent-based networking application is. Here are just a few examples:
- Google+ Hangouts
- Facebook’s Messenger app
Whether you’re a marketer or an information technologist, intent-based networking has become the foundation for a new generation of consumer applications and web services. And it’s no accident that today, the most popular consumer applications and web services use intent-based networking protocols at some capacity. All of them allow you to automatically detect and monitor your network traffic so that you can quickly identify network congestion, identify new users on your network, predict future traffic patterns, and even detect if there’s a change in load on your network. In effect, they enable companies to automate their networks in ways that were previously impossible, without having to wait for engineers to design new products on top of existing protocols. It’s hard to overstate how significant intent-based networking is becoming: it’s already the tech behind everything from Facebook Messenger (1 billion monthly active users), Google+ Hangouts (over 150 million monthly active users), Instagram (3 billion monthly active users), Snapchat (10 million daily active users), LinkedIn (14 billion connections), Twitter (50 million tweets per day), and all manner of other popular services that have emerged in recent years. It is also poised to be the foundation for many more products in social media, Facebook itself has announced plans for an app that will use intent-based networking as its backbone. Indeed, if you want to look at just one example, look no further than Google+, which launched with no advertising at all aside from just sponsored channels like Google AdSense attached to YouTube videos.
What are the benefits of using Apstra?
Juniper Networks released Apstra, a network automation platform to address the challenges facing today’s data center. Juniper announced that it has developed intent-based networking (IBN) technology to automate and validate the design, deployment and operation of data center networks.
The company said that intent-based networking takes advantage of the Junos OS’s open architecture, capability and security features – including OpenFlow and its IETF standard, QoS – to provide end users with a comprehensive network automation solution.
Juniper announced its network automation strategy in 2018. The company said it will use the same approach as it did with its core networking software, Junos OS to develop a new generation of products for a wide range of data centers.
How does Apstra work?
We like to think of networking as a competitive sport, and we’re not wrong. It does take some time for the first team to figure out the rules and the next team to start playing. We’re in the same boat. We wanted to make an open-source, data-driven software tool that could help us make sense of what was going on in our own network:
- What is happening with this particular device?
- Which devices are connected to it?
- Where are they, how often are they connected, how long are they connected for, etc.?
It can be challenging to get the right answers at any given point in time, especially when you don’t know what your network looked like at a given moment in time. That’s where intent-based networking comes in: instead of asking who is connected or where they are or how often they are connected, you simply ask “What is happening with this particular device?” and Apstra will provide you with a particular report that captures all relevant information about each device at all times during its life cycle. This results in much more accurate reporting and diagnostics which helps you troubleshoot problems faster than you can without intent-based networking.
The real power of intent-based networking is that it is data-driven: it collects data from every mode of your network from day 0 to day 2+ (the timer includes all events such as reboot/power up/failure), then analyzes them to create reports on when and why events happened as well as identify patterns such as trends. By measuring everything that happens across your entire network infrastructure (and acting accordingly), intent-based networking makes it easy to determine which nodes need attention and how much attention you should give them.
What sets Apstra apart from other intent-based networking solutions?
Apstra is the only intent-based networking solution that offers multivendor support. This means that organizations can choose to use a single Juniper network management platform or join a multivendor network of their choosing. All this comes at a very low cost: the minimum initial investment is $49 per month, and an annual subscription is $199 per month.
Apstra is the best solution for automating and managing data center networks. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a growing technology that connects billions of devices to the internet. The demand for such connectivity is driving the expansion of IoT-connected technologies, including smart devices, sensors, and networked appliances. To meet this growth, technology providers are working with partners to build vast-scale infrastructure that can monitor and manage billions of connected devices. With a tightly integrated product lifecycle management (LCM) solution, they can provide a vast scale environment for their customers from Day 1 to Day 2.