As networking moves away from an emphasis on heavy hardware boxes to cloud-based computing, traditional companies such as Juniper Networks Inc. are adopting a cloud-first strategy, evolving alongside customers on their cloud migration journeys and helping them integrate smoothly into multicloud and hybrid-cloud universes. While there can be complexity in cloud, Juniper is positioned to make the pivot from hardware- to software-based networking solutions.

“Networking is following a similar paradigm,” said Disha Chopra, (pictured), senior manager of product management at Juniper Networks Inc. “The hardware boxes, they’re definitely our bread and butter still, but it’s the software now that’s enabling and giving it the ‘cool factor’ and the innovation that’s happening.”

Chopra spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host, Lauren Cooney (@lcooney), founder and chief executive officer of Spark Labs Consulting LLC, during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed how the needs of networks are changing, as well as how Juniper’s Contrail offering can assist in Kubernetes. (* Disclosure below.)

Security, reliability and scale

Contrail, one of Juniper’s main new product offerings, provides a high layer of abstraction into the cloud. No matter where the workloads reside within a multicloud environment, Contrail provides the “plumbing” between different platforms, Chopra explained. For example, if a client has workloads deployed in AWS, Microsoft Azure and on-premises, Contrail makes it easy for these disparate workloads to communicate with each other, she added.

As more developers are moving toward containers for standardized packaging and deploying of software applications, Contrail interfaces easily with the popular container orchestration platform Kubernetes to support workloads across cloud providers. While Kubernetes provides orchestration between workflows, Contrail works to facilitating communications between Kubernetes pods. For instance, if Kubernetes is made to scale up a workload from 10 to 20 pods, Contrail is sitting underneath, providing the networking for those 20 pods.

“So when those 20 pods spin up, Kubernetes pokes Contrail and says, ‘Hey, 20 more, and these need to talk to those 10 pods that were already there,’” Chopra stated.

Driven by a customer request for microservices, another new Juniper product is the SRX virtual firewall, a containerized, host-based, full-service firewall. No matter whether a customer wishes to work within a private, hybrid or public cloud, SRX provides the secure, flexible networking that they seek, according to Chopra.

“When we talk to our customers, that’s what we tell them — that with a Juniper-based solution, we have so many [offerings] that work together in a cohesive way to give you that end-to-end connectivity, secure automated multicloud. That’s our mantra,” Chopra said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS reInvent. (* Disclosure: Juniper Networks Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Juniper Networks nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE