>> Live from Las Vegas,
it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018,
brought to you by Amazon Web Services,
Intel, and their ecosystem partners.
(techy music)
>> Hey, welcome back, everybody.
Jeff Frick here with theCUBE,
we're at AWS re:Invent 2018 in Las Vegas,
day two of four days of coverage.
I think we'll do 120 interviews.
I mean, this is the most poppin' show in tech right now.
We're really excited to be here,
and joined by my cohost, Lauren Cooney.
Lauren, great to see you. >> Thank you.
Great to see you, too. >> And we've got... (chuckling)
We've got our next guest, it's Disha Chopra,
she's a senior manager, product line
manager for Juniper Networks, welcome.
>> Thank you, feels great to be here.
>> Good. >> So, what do you think
of this show, have you been to re:Invent before?
>> Oh, my God, no, this is my first one, and I am so excited.
The energy is so great, it's vibrant,
I'm learning a lot, I'm very happy to be here.
>> So, Juniper's been around for a long time,
way predating this cloud, this whole cloud thing,
so what are you guys up to, what's the latest,
and really, why are you here at re:Invent?
What's your story with AWS? >> Yeah, absolutely.
So, I think the latest thing with us
is as early as today there was...
We were posted on the AWS partner solution website.
Vodafone is partnering with Juniper
for their SD-WAN offering with, you know,
the SD-WAN controller that's sitting in AWS,
managing all their branch offices,
so that's what's the newest with us,
and you know, we've been making waves
with a lot of partnerships recently.
Couple of months ago, or maybe just a month ago,
we announced with Nutanix, so that announcement
was focused more for our enterprise customers.
Integration with Nutanix is a hyperconverged infrastructure
where Juniper will be, you know,
integral part of their networking,
providing for their converged infrastructure,
and then before that, I think
a few months ago we had Red Hat.
We announced a partnership with Red Hat,
and you know, that's focused on our telco cloud.
So, as you were mentioning, Juniper's
been around for a long time-- >> Right.
>> And you know, telco clouds are our strong suite.
Telcos, now telco cloud, right,
and similarly for enterprise.
If you think about it, you know, large enterprises
and telcos, they're not that different, right?
So, that's where we were at, and that's more kind of...
We're following the evolution like our customers are, right?
They used to be telco, now they're telco cloud.
Juniper, I think the newest thing with Juniper,
to be honest, in technology I spoke about partnerships,
but it's our cloud-first strategy.
That's what we have in mind.
We are evolving with our customers,
helping them in their journey for
cloud adoption, cloud migration, right?
It's a couple of sentences to say that,
"Oh, we're helping our customers with cloud migration,"
but we're, you know, there's so many steps in between.
They are very complex, you need a lot of handholding,
and we're right there for our customers.
>> So, what does that actually mean when you are,
you know, saying that you're helping your customers?
Are you working with them to bring them
multicloud solutions from AWS and Microsoft
and Google, or you know-- >> Correct, exactly.
>> Can you give me a scenario or a use case?
>> Yeah, absolutely, so like I was saying,
traditionally, Juniper was, you know,
a hardware-focused company,
so our existing customer base,
they bought a lot of big, heavy boxes from us,
and of course, on top of it came a world class
routing and switching software component, right,
and it was all bundled up and sold together.
Now, you know, they're moving towards the cloud,
towards AWS, towards GCP, towards Azure.
We want to be able to provide to them,
and who better to provide this service to them.
We understand their on-prem network.
We understand cloud networking.
We understand the transport in between.
So, what we're doing is for our customers
we manage their existing on-prem network,
which you know, a lot of our customers,
you know, they're huge and they have a significant
amount of footprint, global footprint, right,
so we understand that, we're able to connect them
to the AWS, to the GCP, to the Azure, right,
and the value proposition for them is that
if they wanted to do it themselves
they have to understand, you know, three different
or five different clouds, right.
You have IBM, you have DigitalOcean.
There's a lot out there, right, and getting the opecs
or getting the talent to be able to understand
all these things and do the migration, it's hard, right?
This is a complex problem to solve,
so what Juniper brings to the table is we abstract it out.
So, for example, I wanted to move--
>> Yeah, well I just want to say, you know,
one of the things that you're talking about here,
and this is a total switch, if I'm right,
is are you becoming a managed service provider?
>> We do have a managed service--
>> Because it sounds like you're going to
be putting a lot more money into that
side of the business-- >> Correct.
>> Versus the straight-up product side of the business.
>> Yeah, yeah, that's where we are
pivoting from, you know, we want...
Our perception used to be that we're a hardware company,
now we're a cloud-first company.
We're a software company, so we're definitely
pivoting towards the, you know software-based solutions,
software-based, you know, offerings.
It's like your iPhone, right, or your phone.
You buy the hardware but you're really buying it
for the iOS or for the applications that run on it.
Networking is following a similar paradigm now, right?
The hardware boxes, they're definitely
our bread and butter still,
but it's the software now that's enabling
and giving it all the cool factor and the innovation
that's happening, it's all in the software.
Contrail, that's our story for multicloud.
That's one of our product offerings.
So, what Contrail does is, and I think that's
what I was kind of referring to earlier,
it gives you that higher level of abstraction
where you don't have to worry about:
"Is my workload running in AWS?
"Is my workload running in GCP?"
It doesn't matter, right, you as a enterprise,
or as a telco, we want you to focus on, you know,
powering your applications, powering your services.
We don't want you to worry about
your infrastructure, that's our job, right?
We want to completely hide all the complexity
away from you, and just, you know,
let you do what generates revenue.
>> So, as an application developer, right,
so I'm an application developer
and I use Azure, for example,
right-- >> Yeah.
>> And that's kind of my platform,
and I'm, you know, doing some interesting stuff
with like, you know, some scripting,
or I'm building, you know, just a general, like,
new website or something like that with,
you know, a couple different things.
So, as a developer at that level,
I don't even know about Contrail.
>> Exactly, exactly. >> Exactly, but I don't think
Contrail yet extends up to that layer
where it can manage everything across multiple clouds.
>> So, it provides you as a developer,
like you said, you're writing an application,
you don't care about the infrastructure.
It's just there, right? >> Mm-hm.
>> And we want to keep it that way.
Contrail is there, Contrail is at that level.
Contrail is going to provide the plumbing,
so you as a developer, today everything,
all developers are moving towards containers, right?
So, for example, the Red Hat partnership
that I brought up earlier, that's focused on
the Red Hat OpenShift platform, their path service,
which is a container-based service.
Contrail integrates with Kubernetes,
we integrate with Mesos, we integrate with Docker.
So, as a developer, when you employ these tools
to write your code, you know, using a CICD platform,
Contrail is sitting right under it,
giving you that connectivity.
So, for example, when you're developing your application
and (clearing throat) you know, you deploy it,
you deploy part of it in Azure,
you deploy part of it in AWS, right,
and you don't care where it goes, you just--
>> Or you use one for, like, bursting or something like that.
>> Exactly, yeah, yeah.
>> You know, the rest of it on-prem.
>> Correct, so-- >> That sort of thing.
>> You know, it's distributed, right?
So, who's going to plumb it and make sure
that it's giving you the results that you need?
That's where Contrail comes in.
Gives you that plumbing between on-prem, between AWS.
>> So, how is that different from Kubernetes as a whole?
Like, I know that it's, you know, it does like
container management, orchestration, deployment--
>> Correct. >> Delivery, how does--
>> Right. >> Contrail kind of come in
and work with Kubernetes? >> Right.
So, great question, by the way, you know your stuff,
so (laughing) Kubernetes is...
Kubernetes is orchestration for your workloads, right?
It's services, Kubernetes provides a service,
like it gives you a service web.
You deploy a bunch of Kubernetes minions,
they all work together to give you
that application that you need.
Now, what Contrail does is it provides
the networking between those Kubernetes pods.
So, let's say you want to scale up your application.
Okay, you had 10 pods, now you want to go to 20.
Kubernetes makes that decision for you
that you need the 20 pods, and then
Contrail is sitting under it giving
you 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," right?
>> So, Contrail is opensource, right?
>> Correct.
>> Why haven't you donated it yet to the CNCF?
>> (chuckling) We are part of CNCF, we recently--
>> I know that. >> Yeah.
>> But fundamentally, if you want
that to be pulled as much as you do...
>> Yeah. >> It's already opensource.
>> Yeah, you're right. >> You might as well
kind of get on that thread with the
Kubernetes folks-- >> Right, yeah.
>> And start talking to them about how
you make it part of, you know, the core distribution
that then goes into, you know, six different distro.
>> Correct, correct, yeah.
>> You know, something along those lines
versus don't start your own distro.
(chuckling) >> Sorry.
>> Right, don't start your own distro,
but look at how you can become integrated
into that Kubernetes stream, the main stream.
>> Correct, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, no, that is definitely something that,
like you're saying, it's something
that we, you know, we want to do,
that's the direction that we want to go at,
but I think the actual decision is maybe
above my pay grade, so I don't (chuckling)
want to make a commitment here.
>> Fair enough. >> So, you know... (chuckling)
>> Disha, I want to followup on a slightly different track.
When you talk about cloud-first,
and you answered the question,
which is when you say cloud-first,
is that, you know, kind of the way you're going
to market with your customers, or is that
the way you guys are looking at Juniper
in terms of transforming the company?
>> Mm-hm. >> And it sounds like you said
it's more of the latter, really starting
to reformulate Juniper-- >> Correct.
>> As a cloud first service company.
>> Exactly.
>> So, how is that transformation going inside
the company, that's a pretty significant--
>> It is, it is, yeah. >> Shift from selling boxes
and maintenance agreements and--
>> Yeah. >> Shipping metal.
>> Yeah, we are definitely modernizing from within,
right, but a lot of it is driven by our customers.
Like I was saying, you know, they are evolving,
they want to connect to the cloud,
and you know, we obviously want to help them do that.
As part of that, we want to be microservices-based,
right, because we want to be able to support containers.
These are just things that, you know, we need to do.
Juniper is a leader as far as, you know,
innovation and networking is concerned.
>> Right, right. >> So, it was never a question
of if we want to do this, or if we want to go down
this path or not, right, it's when, right?
>> Right, right.
>> And we are definitely working
day in and day out to make that happen,
so you know, a lot of our offerings,
like recently we came out with
our containerized SRX solution.
SRX is our full-feature, full-service, next generation
firewall, and we have containerized it, right.
I believe it's the first offering of its kind,
containerized, host-based firewall,
so you know, innovative stuff happening all the time.
Like you said, you know, it's definitely a Herculean task--
>> Right, right. >> But we're up for it--
>> Right. >> And we're doing it.
>> And I'm just curious to when the
customer conversations-- >> Yeah.
>> You know, the hybrid cloud, multicloud,
public cloud conversation, right,
it's a lot of conversation.
How do you take your customers down the path?
Where do you see them, you know,
trying to navigate in what's got to be
a pretty complex world for-- >> It is, definitely.
>> A CIO trying to figure out what they're supposed
to buy and not buy, how to pay attention,
can I hit all the booths-- >> Right, right, right, right.
>> Here at AWS in three days, I don't think so.
>> (laughing) I know, yeah, these conversations,
to be honest, have been going for
the past couple of years, right.
A lot of our customers, the intent is there
to move to the cloud, and you know,
we are trying to help them with it,
so you know, we design with them.
We design their network, we design their topologies,
we handhold them telling them how to do this,
right, their existing networks that they have.
The complexity comes in because everything, right,
think of a company, right, a large company.
It then goes ahead and acquires 10 more,
and they all have their own networks,
they all have their own environments,
VMware, Red Hat, you know, Tabix,
so different kinds of environments
now all need to connect to the cloud.
You don't want them to be siloed.
You also don't want to deal with, you know,
all those different kinds of, like I was saying, you know,
skillset to be able to connect them all individually.
So, when we talk to our customers,
that's what we tell them, that you know,
with a Juniper-based solution we have so many of them
that work together in a cohesive way
to give you that end-to-end connectivity.
Secure, automated multicloud, that's our mantra, right,
and it's as far as, you know,
engineering is concerned, engineering simplicity.
If you come down to Juniper it's plastered all over
the walls, right, engineering simplicity.
We were really driving that message internally so that...
And a lot of the CICD stuff, right?
The way we want our customers to use it
is how we're using it, so that, you know,
that improves our quality, that improves
reliability, and all those things.
So, in terms of handling our customers,
we talk, you know, we're there on the table day one.
We talk to them about their design.
I see that a lot of our customers,
currently where they're at is they
are trying to connect to the cloud.
They all want to move towards the container,
you know, the containerized services.
They know that's the right thing to do.
They're not quite there yet, right?
The intent is definitely there,
they're playing with it, but in terms
of being in production, we're still,
you know, a little bit off.
Not too much, but we'll get there soon, right.
So, we talk to them, we talk about, you know,
how they can make their applications cloud ready.
There's a couple of ways to do it.
You lift and shift, or you know, directly move,
go cloud native. >> Right, right.
>> So, we have all these discussions with them.
You know, what fits their bill, right?
What is good for them, what is
it that's going to work for them?
And then, you know, of course the connectivity piece,
right, but with it security, reliability, and scale.
Right, a company like Juniper obviously,
you know, innovator in networking,
we solve problems at a different
level, right? >> Right, right.
>> For our much larger customers.
So, we talk to them about scale,
we talk to them about, you know,
reliable security is huge, right.
You have a workload that you spun up on-prem,
and then, now, you know, you have...
Your requirements have changed,
you're going to have to replicate it, say, in AWS.
When you replicate it, you still want the same
security that you had on-prem to apply to this workload,
which is now going to be in AWS, how do you do that?
It's easy with Contrail, right, because it's intent-driven.
You specify the intent, in fact, you specified
the intent when you brought up the first workload,
and it captured it, "Okay, I'm supposed to talk to..."
You know, say I'm workload red and I can only
talk to other red workloads and I cannot talk
to the blue workloads, something like that, right?
>> Right, right.
>> So, you specify the intent, and then
when that red workload now comes up in AWS,
it already knows that I wasn't supposed
to talk to the green workload, so that policy
and all the intent moves with that workload.
>> Right, right.
>> And this is all done through Contrail, right,
and the other thing, that single pane of glass.
I'm sure you've heard about it a lot today, right.
The single pane of glass, you specify it one time.
Again, the abstraction away from all those,
you know, five clouds that you're working with,
you specify the red workload,
the policy for the red workload one time,
and then it doesn't matter where you bring it up,
Contrail will automatically apply it everywhere,
and you know, it's good to go.
>> That's great. >> Well, Disha, thanks
for coming on, you certainly got the energy to attack
this big problem, so... (laughing)
Juniper's fortunate to have you.
>> Great, thank you for having me.
>> Thanks for coming on and sharing the story.
>> It's been wonderful talking to you guys.
>> All right, Disha, she's Lauren, I'm Jeff.
You're watching theCUBE, we're at AWS re:Invent 2018.
Come on down, we're in the main expo hall
right by the center, thanks for watching.
(techy music)