Juniper Networks Explains the Key Success Factors of Autonomous Transport Networking
Network automation has a critical role to play in the future of industries.
In this Tech Field Day Showcase, Cyril Doussau and Kevin Landry discuss Juniper® Paragon Automation. Paragon Automation is Juniper Networks’ suite of cloud-native software applications that is designed to eliminate repeatable tasks by putting them on auto-pilot, saving time and cost. Hear the presenters talk about the three success factors of building an autonomous transport network.
You’ll learn
How Paragon Automation ensures optimum operational efficiency and high levels of service experience
The key requirements addressed for communications service providers
How Paragon Automation helps automate tasks through the stages of planning, orchestration, assurance and optimization
Who is this for?
Host
Guest speakers
Transcript
0:09 everyone my name is Sheldon I'm
0:11 responsible for evangelizing the
0:13 benefits of Park on automation from
0:15 Juniper Networks so in today's showcase
0:17 we are to review how to build the one
0:21 automation of the future or the
0:23 automated one of the future
0:25 so we the need for alteration is really
0:27 no longer a secret but let me quickly
0:30 review why automation is becoming more
0:32 critical every day
0:34 We are continuing to see a massive
0:36 growth in our Network
0:38 by the end of the decade we will have an
0:41 impressive 20 times more connected
0:43 device
0:44 Network Architects have become more
0:46 efficient and more complex Network
0:48 outage are still very expensive and
0:50 making the news every day and we we all
0:53 know that most outage are due to manual
0:55 changes and today it has become
0:58 impossible to manage change at scale
1:01 by delivering the quality and the speed
1:03 that a CSP customers are requiring so
1:06 something must change and like many in
1:10 the market today are many other network
1:12 leaders we believe that automation has a
1:15 critical world to play and luckily for
1:17 us and locally for the industry
1:19 things can improve 75 percent of all
1:23 networking activity are still manual
1:25 today
1:26 even more we have 63 percent of csps
1:29 that are using manual processes to
1:30 manage their service life cycle and we
1:33 learn from csps and from the analytics
1:35 community that actually when they try to
1:38 do it themselves 70 of their projects
1:40 fail and it's really due to the
1:43 complexity of building an automated one
1:45 so another issue that we see is the fact
1:49 that 60 percent of network problems are
1:53 still not discovered by netapps and so
1:56 when we want to automatically
1:57 automatically improve networks or
2:01 um automate Networks
2:03 we need to understand where the problems
2:06 come from and it cannot happen if the
2:08 problems are not visible
2:10 so this is why at Juniper Networks we
2:14 did launch Pagan Automation and pagon is
2:17 really a suite of applications products
2:21 that have been designed to automate the
2:23 the planning the orchestration the
2:25 assurance and the optimization of modern
2:28 networks so with spark on automation you
2:31 can provision devices with your touch
2:33 you can automate service activation and
2:36 testing you can leverage AI to
2:38 accelerate food cause analysis You can
2:41 predict issues and resolve them faster
2:44 and optimize Network automatically
2:48 so what what our customers are starting
2:50 with simple use case they can leverage
2:52 the same technology to deliver on a
2:55 short experience with closed loop
2:56 automation
2:58 and you know everyone here if you a
3:02 fixed language provider if you if you're
3:05 a mobile provider if you have a business
3:07 service provider and even a large
3:09 Enterprise a significant Party part of
3:12 the traffic the application critical
3:14 traffic is going to go through through
3:16 the the one the transport Networks and
3:19 so when we talk about building an
3:22 autonomous one also we need to think
3:25 about managing multiple Network domains
3:29 so you will have to automate an Access
3:31 Network such as a Metro or Cloud Network
3:33 an aggregation Network The Edge and the
3:36 core and so all those Network domains
3:39 and various layers from Optical layer to
3:42 layer 3 will need to be fully automatic
3:45 automated and in order to deliver that
3:49 that Antoine Automotive one
3:52 so while many have invested in a service
3:56 orchestrator here
3:57 some of the service fulfillment and
3:59 service Assurance function would need to
4:01 be leveraged in order to achieve this
4:05 um and so the networks become truly
4:07 programmable and driven through apis
4:12 as the automation is quite of a wide
4:15 topic and so we decided to focus that
4:18 attack field day on traffic engineering
4:20 and closed group remediation and this is
4:23 simply because when we inquiry with the
4:25 market when we look at our customers and
4:27 as well the large Enterprise and the CSP
4:30 out there they are telling us that
4:32 traffic engineering and close-up
4:33 remediation are the two main use case
4:36 that they are focusing on right now and
4:39 and planning to invest in technology to
4:42 to solve those problems so here we're
4:45 going to talk to the today about past
4:47 diversity latency based footing
4:49 autonomous capacity optimization and
4:52 closed loop remediation and I will pass
4:54 to Kevin who will talk about those
4:56 critical success factors
4:59 my name is Kevin Landry and I work with
5:01 Cyril here on evangelizing our Network
5:04 automation solution for the when at
5:06 Juniper Networks and today I'm going to
5:09 be covering key success factors that are
5:11 critical to moving towards an autonomous
5:14 transport Network
5:17 so moving uh to the first success factor
5:21 it's actually one of uh The Usual
5:24 Suspects for intent-based Automation and
5:27 it's model based service orchestration
5:29 which accelerates provisioning and
5:32 orchestration of the stateful VPN
5:33 Services you're going to see on the
5:35 right of the slide and really what this
5:38 does is it reduces configuration
5:39 complexity and the need for heavy manual
5:43 provisioning efforts what's important is
5:46 that the service modeling will abstract
5:48 complexity and with this standards based
5:51 approach the network data is normalized
5:54 and correlated to services in a way that
5:56 provides a service-centric visibility
6:01 the the next key success factor
6:06 um our second one is actually one that
6:08 is surprisingly overlooked uh by many
6:10 network network vendor automation
6:12 Solutions today yet we feel it's so
6:15 important uh it's called active data
6:18 plane measurements and that's where you
6:20 have test agents deployed in the network
6:22 to inject synthetic traffic that appears
6:25 just like an end user and it's important
6:27 because you really can't improve what
6:29 you don't measure so what this does is
6:33 it allows you to measure the actual
6:35 service experience during monitoring or
6:38 it's able to load tests to measure slays
6:41 before you even activate this service
6:43 and the beauty of that is that with this
6:47 service-centric approach uh it's able to
6:50 test on the data plane so you can
6:52 inherently test across any domain
6:55 whatever infrastructure technology
6:56 you're using whether it's across the
6:59 when whether across Cloud Server service
7:01 chains and the data centers or even over
7:04 sd-wan or even across partner partner
7:07 domains or the internet where you might
7:10 not have control of these networks so
7:13 you really get a really specific
7:15 visibility end to end
7:17 you know as a service provider obviously
7:19 the new turnip testing is is
7:22 straightforward and you know happens
7:24 when you turn on the circuit but one of
7:26 the things we've struggled with
7:28 as a service provider is how to provide
7:31 this at scale across the the whole
7:34 network because as soon as you have
7:36 hundreds or thousands of services across
7:39 hundreds or thousands of devices you
7:42 know running this level of of testing to
7:45 verify the service starts to become
7:48 problematic so what are your responses
7:51 to to deal with that situation I'm
7:53 really happy you asked that question
7:55 because in the past with passive DPI
7:58 type Solutions there was a lot of uh I
8:00 guess cost and effort to deploy
8:02 expensive probes in the network and that
8:04 was very uh it wasn't very timely
8:07 because you know it wasn't easy to roll
8:09 those out in a very quick way so you
8:11 have immediate kpis and you know that
8:13 service level quality visibility so the
8:18 solution that we have at Juniper
8:20 Networks which is called Paragon active
8:23 Assurance what it's able to do is it's
8:26 able to be very lightweight so that you
8:29 could deploy it in terms of the test
8:31 agents as either a virtual Network
8:34 function
8:35 um on a hypervisor or if you're using
8:38 cloud cloud native approach and you're
8:42 able to deploy it as a container as well
8:44 or you know a software on a server so
8:47 the idea is you're able to deploy these
8:49 in a way that you could hit any part of
8:52 the network and strategically place them
8:54 and it's very quick to be able to do
8:57 this customers are able to basically do
9:01 this within hours kind of thing and get
9:03 their Network up uh with with testing
9:05 it's very easy and something else we
9:08 actually launched this year was within
9:11 our devices itself for our Cloud Metro
9:13 we actually have embedded natively the
9:17 test agents within the router software
9:19 for ACX family and what that gives you
9:23 is the ability ability to turn that on
9:25 on the routers itself from day one so
9:28 that you have immediate access to
9:30 testing so it's really going Beyond you
9:33 know the reflection based testing that a
9:34 lot of the vendors were using like
9:36 t-womp and and that kind of mechanism to
9:40 something that's really testing service
9:42 quality end to end and in a way that is
9:47 um service Centric so you actually know
9:49 that what you're testing is like end
9:51 user traffic because you're actually
9:53 injecting end user traffic or synthetic
9:55 traffic
9:56 so yeah and then as a follow-up if
9:59 you're not using the standard reflection
10:01 RFC methods uh how do you present that
10:05 to a client that it's they're okay with
10:08 you using their service for this for
10:11 this testing thing for you know adding
10:14 traffic to the service they're paying
10:16 for
10:17 so a lot of times what happens is if you
10:21 have a self-service portal as a service
10:24 provider and you offer that to your
10:26 customers we're able to offer a solution
10:30 that allows you to do HTTP uh yes speed
10:34 testing so you could actually as a
10:37 customer test the connectivity of your
10:39 application and validate that SLA
10:41 performance so that's one way as a
10:44 customer that they see this but many
10:46 times
10:47 um I guess the notion of being able to
10:50 be able to be proactive and be able to
10:53 prevent these uh kind of issues before
10:55 customers even see them happening is
10:58 really what's key for the solution we
11:00 want to be able to give and enable this
11:03 providers A solution that's able to keep
11:06 them ahead of problems so that they're
11:08 able to address them so they could
11:09 really eliminate all the the customer
11:12 dissatisfaction from poor quality and
11:16 the customer churn that's associated it
11:18 with that so when you're dealing with
11:19 customers like health care and finance
11:22 they're comfortable with the carrier
11:24 injecting traffic into their private
11:26 service the amount of traffic that we
11:28 inject is very very small
11:30 yeah very tiny doesn't damage the series
11:33 yeah like we're talking about a very
11:36 small amount of traffic that there's
11:38 really no performance concerns when uh
11:41 you inject this level of traffic and now
11:44 of course we can scale up and do load
11:46 testing as well if we want to test you
11:48 know some kind of data center backup and
11:50 that we could actually reach that you
11:52 know level of bandwidth we could do that
11:55 too but you would also have the RFC
11:58 options available if people weren't
12:00 comfortable with non-standard things
12:02 being done it definitely I mean we are
12:04 testing from Layer Two all the way to
12:08 layer seven so you know all the
12:10 different standards in terms of like the
12:12 IP and ethernet layer we're doing all
12:15 the the bread and butter cases that you
12:17 would be able to do on the devices
12:18 themselves but we go beyond that to do
12:21 you know all the way up to layer of
12:23 seven as well
12:24 I think uh having this built in is a
12:27 real great uh competitive feature
12:29 because what we're seeing with some of
12:30 the Enterprise uh based testing products
12:34 is they're still in the costly onesie
12:36 choosy hundreds range and what I'm
12:40 anticipating is scaling this up but if
12:42 you can get your provider to do a lot of
12:44 it for you that really simplifies the
12:47 Enterprise customer side for the service
12:50 provider I would think
12:51 definitely this data that gets um you
12:56 know this testing data you obviously are
12:58 going to have a whole wealth of
12:59 information potentially over time is
13:02 that trackable anywhere long term can
13:04 you set up regular testing that just I
13:06 mean obviously it's active so that you
13:09 know presumably these are ongoing things
13:11 is it is it recorded anywhere that can
13:13 be referenced as a baseline yeah
13:15 definitely uh basically there's the
13:18 approach where we're doing monitoring
13:20 and you're able to feed that data even
13:22 into other performance systems in fact
13:24 we do that where we feed this kind of
13:26 data say we're doing some kind of
13:28 latency testing for instance we might
13:30 feed that data into what we have in
13:33 terms of our AI engine which is in
13:37 another product called Paragon insights
13:39 so with that you're able to get not only
13:41 the service level visibility but go
13:43 deeper into you know other types of
13:45 telemetry and actually that's what I'm
13:47 going to talk about on the next slide we
13:49 believe that it's a marriage of both
13:51 Telemetry approaches with the passive
13:54 data with the active data that's the
13:56 best choice
13:57 so I guess moving on then um to the
14:00 third success factor and that's really
14:02 you know to extend the conversation that
14:04 we were just having having a
14:06 comprehensive Network observability
14:08 stack is key because your automation
14:11 that you have is really only as good as
14:13 the insights that drive it so this is
14:16 very important for both improving
14:18 operational efficiency but also to
14:20 enable that automation so yeah having
14:23 that breadth of telemetry data is so
14:25 useful
14:26 um you know it gives you that visibility
14:28 into Network performance but it's also
14:30 able to mount that to services so that
14:33 you could understand their health as
14:35 well
14:35 and really as I was talking about in the
14:39 questions the data could be it's very
14:41 versatile we could actually you know
14:43 export it to you know different systems
14:45 but we could ingest it from whatever
14:47 data source uh and that we think is a
14:49 best practice you really need to be
14:51 flexible on that uh whether it's a data
14:54 lake or a third-party system whatever
14:56 infrastructure domain whatever vendor
14:58 you have to be able to normalize it and
15:01 make it meaningful by deriving specific
15:03 kpis
15:05 uh but the problem is the Telemetry can
15:08 only get you so far so that's why we
15:10 really advocate for the active data
15:12 plane measurements that really should be
15:14 a part of that observability stack
15:16 because as mentioned you're not going to
15:18 be able to improve it if you can't
15:20 measure it but in addition that I'll
15:22 just extend it even further you can't
15:24 React to what you don't know about so
15:26 what we're finding in a lot of customers
15:28 uh and why they they buy into this is
15:31 that the measurements often help them to
15:33 detect detect silent issues that have
15:36 been creeping up in them or they didn't
15:38 even know existed and those are the ones
15:40 that would eventually disrupt services
15:42 so that's why this is so powerful
15:45 you mentioned earlier about the
15:48 Telemetry and you can only have both the
15:51 Telemetry information on all the
15:52 visibility based on the data you get
15:54 into the box so then my question goes on
15:57 the lines of what does happen or or how
16:01 do you get information into the tool
16:04 that is not necessarily driven or
16:06 derived from your measurements assumed
16:09 you have a service provider that of
16:12 course lives in the future and uses net
16:15 box to have a single source of Truth and
16:18 reporting that has a list of prefixes or
16:21 links or any other type of information
16:23 are you able to ingest all that because
16:26 there is a limit to what you can measure
16:28 with the with the agents and this also
16:30 goes hand in hand with multi-vendor
16:33 environments definitely and so the way
16:35 junipers approach that is we don't do it
16:37 within our active Assurance product we
16:40 do this when we marry it with our
16:42 Paragon insights that you're able to
16:44 have an approach where you know we do
16:46 all the the base like Kafka bus type
16:49 things and rest API ingest and you know
16:53 through netconf and and like you know
16:55 any kind of telemetry right grpc you
16:58 know all the all of that's done for
17:00 streaming Telemetry but
17:03 um where we go beyond is we have
17:05 something called bring your own ingest
17:07 so that allows you to basically write
17:10 rules where you could ingest from any
17:12 data source
17:13 um so I hope that answers your question
17:16 okay so for instance because is earlier
17:19 than we were talking about then a
17:22 service being then turned up and doing
17:24 testing but what if for instance you
17:26 deployed and there's a there's a brown
17:29 uh Brownfield deployment and then oh
17:33 there is a service that we just have to
17:35 turn out we just put a p in this
17:37 particular section of the network yeah
17:39 the rest is irrelevant but then you get
17:42 into the tool you simply add a new node
17:44 or do you have to pull the new node from
17:47 another different tool because again
17:50 there will be many things that are
17:52 driven by automation but there are
17:54 always these special cases that are not
17:56 covered by some automation then which
17:58 are the other ways in which you can add
18:00 this can you get into the tool and put
18:01 another node and things like that
18:03 exactly you could do that
18:05 um so you know you could add a device
18:07 into monitoring and it's important to
18:10 note that we support Legacy types of
18:12 collection like SNMP and even CLI right
18:16 so
18:17 um it's really uh I guess we're trying
18:20 to focus on the flexibility to be able
18:22 to really include any data source and
18:25 it's important I think it's a best
18:26 practice that you're able to have that I
18:29 guess programmability uh we go and
18:32 extend that further we have the ability
18:34 to even take that data and automate it
18:37 with what we call playbooks so you're
18:39 basically using the data to trigger
18:42 actions and we could integrate with sdn
18:45 the solutions like our Paragon
18:47 Pathfinder to you know trigger
18:48 optimization or even orchestration
18:51 systems where we're gonna you know
18:53 provision as well based on you know if
18:55 there's a change needed that we need to
18:57 react to in the network I guess at the
18:59 heart of what we're going to be talking
19:01 to today is our fourth success factor
19:03 and it's the one that we're actually
19:06 going to be focusing on demoing today in
19:08 our second video recording and it's all
19:11 about AI driven multi-vendor sdn control
19:13 which really is the foundation to moving
19:16 towards that autonomous self driving
19:19 Network and some of the use cases we're
19:22 going to talk to you about today include
19:24 path diversity latency based routing
19:27 autonomous capacity optimization and
19:31 closed-loop
19:32 Remediation and again that's going to be
19:35 in the demos so I won't talk too much
19:36 because we're going to hear a lot about
19:37 that from Julian
19:40 um
19:41 and then I'll move on to the final and
19:44 fifth success factor which is related to
19:49 sdn control as well and it's
19:52 multi-vendor interoperability so you
19:55 know a lot of vendors claim multi-vendor
19:58 interoperability multi multi-vendor
20:00 support but we feel that it's really
20:01 important as a best practice to get
20:04 involved in testing that and actually
20:06 you know kind of not just talking the
20:10 talk but walking the walk so to speak
20:12 you know we want to make all this
20:15 automation work in today's modern
20:17 networks no matter what vendor that's
20:19 being used and it's really important in
20:22 order to do that and get the best
20:25 results that you prove it out with you
20:27 know some kind of organization such as
20:29 the eantc
20:31 um where we were able to do
20:32 interoperability testing with other
20:35 vendors that are the the key ones that
20:37 they're in the industry anyways and also
20:40 to be able to you know have experience
20:43 with our product managing multi-vendor
20:46 devices and real customer deployments
20:50 um so what we do is all the leading
20:53 vendors in when sdn control we get
20:55 together annually for this
20:57 interoperability testing at the entc and
21:00 this year we were able to validate our
21:02 sdn controller which we call Paragon
21:04 Pathfinder with Cisco Nokia and Huawei
21:08 and another thing we've done is we have
21:11 tier one and tier two service provider
21:14 customers where we actually had no
21:16 Juniper install base for our Network
21:18 equipment and those customers deployed
21:22 our Paragon automation to manage those
21:24 other networks based on our competitors
21:26 equipment
21:27 so you know it just goes to show that
21:30 when you uh you know you you go beyond
21:33 just the the normal talk of multi-vendor
21:36 and prove it out great things could
21:38 happen you see that customers will you
21:40 know embrace your equipment because when
21:42 they test it out they know it's working
21:43 right in in talking about that I the
21:46 first of all I think the multi-vendor
21:47 strategy is great I think that's you
21:49 know in service provider it's you know
21:51 pretty much the way it's been for a long
21:52 time so that's great looking at the
21:54 protocol stack here um in the transport
21:56 options that you have I see all The
21:57 Usual Suspects of SRM PLS srv6 bgplu I
22:03 spent a lot of time Consulting for tier
22:04 two and tier three isps typically last
22:06 Mile isps and one of the things we're
22:08 seeing is is that mpls and L3 is getting
22:11 pushed out way far into the last mile
22:13 whereas traditionally it's been you know
22:16 Metro ethernet based and as such we have
22:19 a mix of data planes that are out there
22:20 in a lot of networks where we have ldp
22:22 traditionally and then we're mixing an
22:24 srmpls what does this look like if
22:27 you're a service writer that's in the
22:28 middle of transition from ldp to srmpls
22:32 okay I mean yeah it's the kind of thing
22:36 where
22:37 um well from my past experience I know
22:39 that we support both right so if you're
22:41 using rsvpte you're able to deploy this
22:45 and be able to get that visibility right
22:47 away and start to automate with a little
22:49 bit of control in terms of all these use
22:51 cases that we're going to talk about but
22:53 I think what I'll do is I'm going to
22:56 leave this question and introduce Julian
22:58 because I know that we also do the
23:01 segment routing a lot of times you know
23:03 there's kind of an evolution where they
23:05 start up segment routing in a separate
23:07 negative segment to be able to as a
23:10 green field to start that up so they're
23:12 kind of managing both but they would in
23:14 most my experience they're using two
23:16 different two controllers for that even
23:19 though you could support both in one but
23:21 it's just because of you know scaling to
23:23 different domains uh you know you you
23:26 you mentioned the the mpls side and
23:29 obviously you know psep and and segment
23:32 routing or a big part of making you know
23:34 the multi-vendor on the path side of of
23:37 things work
23:38 and you know with the experience that
23:41 I've had with North Star now Paragon
23:43 Pathfinder you know that you know those
23:46 standards are incredibly important to
23:50 that kind of system working and then in
23:53 the service provider because you know as
23:55 Kevin mentioned there isn't a service
23:56 provider in the world that's a 100
23:59 any vendor so aside from the
24:03 From the Path side of things what are
24:06 the other standards you're working with
24:08 uh to to ensure this end to end working
24:12 thing uh certainly bgp like you know
24:15 protocols like bgpls are helping us gain
24:18 visibility of the topology it's really
24:21 important that we support peace up
24:23 because that's giving us ability to work
24:25 on a multi-vendor basis you know there's
24:28 uh standards for Segment routing uh
24:31 ultimately I think maybe Julian could
24:33 he's more the expert in this domain I
24:35 would say I mean the other sets of
24:39 um standards
24:40 um if you like are related to
24:44 um Telemetry so open config is becoming
24:47 increasingly of interest
24:49 um as a means of you know standardizing
24:51 the way that Telemetry is sensed by the
24:53 network devices to the automation
24:56 systems so certainly we support
24:59 um you know open config as uh um
25:02 Telemetry in ingest mechanisms that's
25:05 another good example of standards-based
25:08 approach