What is Contrail Edge Cloud?
Contrail Edge Cloud delivers functionality into a small footprint to convey cloud capabilities and virtualization to the edge network. “Edge” according to Juniper includes base stations, hub sites, and switching sites. Based on Contrail Networking and Contrail Security from Juniper running on both Kubernetes and OpenStack, Contrail Edge Cloud is anchored on open-source Tungsten Fabric networking software being developed under the auspices of The Linux Foundation.
Use cases of Contrail Edge Cloud
Main use cases of Contrail Edge Cloud, is associated with Edge Computing architecture. Edge computing allows data produced by the internet of things (IoT) devices to be handled closer to where it is produced instead of sending it across long routes to data centers or clouds. Doing this computing closer to the edge of the network lets organizations analyze important data in near real-time – a need for organizations across many industries including manufacturing, health care, telecommunications, and finance.
Video monitoring:
IP Video cameras can gather gigabytes of data at a time. Shipping all of that data to a remote processor takes time and money — especially if you want to use motion detection or facial tracking but edge computing can handle the sort of detection that would conventionally have to be done on a large-scale computer.
Machine Automation:
Edge computing can help create machines that can sense, detect, evolve and learn things without having to be programmed. If you are monitoring the process closely and locally, you can extend the life of that machine and extend the operational effectiveness of that machine by tuning what it’s doing.
Retail:
Several retail chains are making more immersive in-store environments with technologies like AR to attract further shoppers. This needs lower latency, which is where edge computing capabilities come in.
Elements of Contrail Edge Cloud
The Contrail Edge Cloud package comprises Contrail Networking, Contrail Security and AppFormix, Juniper’s software for policy monitoring and network analytics. Contrail Security enforces the policies for Juniper’s SRX firewalls for virtual machines and containers running on OpenStack.
For networking, Juniper has chosen The Linux Foundation’s Tungsten Fabric as the foundation of Contrail Networking. Previously called OpenContrail, which Juniper developed and contributed to the open source community. Tungsten includes a centralized controller for creating, managing and distributing security and network policies. The controller allows the latter through Juniper’s vRouter, which provides the Layer 3 network services.
Red Hat products include its OpenStack distribution; Ceph technology for software-defined storage services; and OpenShift, an integrated development environment for building, managing and deploying Docker-formatted containers. OpenShift manages the latter through the open source Kubernetes container orchestration platform.
Nub8 has strong skills in IOT Infrastructure deployment via Juniper Networking solution. Juniper Network enables organizations to connect, secure, design, manage and track IOT at scale.