Cloud Field Day Report: Juniper Networks Delivers Automation for the AI Era
At Cloud Field Day today, the team from Juniper Networks delivered their vision for how they’re assembling the right technology, partnerships and embrace of industry standards for AI era data center networking requirements. Their discussion focused across operations, openness and solutions and was very much rooted in the recent acquisition of the Apstra technology, network automation software that aims to simplify and scale network management for IT operators.
Juniper detailed how it sees cloud style on-prem networking. Chris Magret detailed the complexity of managing across the alphabet soup of network solutions and made a case for x-vendor oversight with Apstra with Terraform. Chris walked through a demo of configuring a small LAN of Juniper switches and showed how to establish an Apstra routing zone, services network and VLAN through educating Apstra on network topology, Apstra’s automated discovery of network resources including spine and leaf switches as well as server nodes into a blueprint, and automating the configuration of all switches in the network. Chris went further by deploying an application into the fabric using Apstra. The key point of this exercise is demonstrating a cloud native management interface saving IT complexity, time and required skill for network oversight.
We next dove deep into AI cluster design and the specific challenges that AI training places on networking with James Kelly. James discussed GPU fabric rail-optimized design delivering a flatter network topology in groups of eight leafs, called a stripe by Juniper. This localizes traffic and keeps as much traffic as possible off of spines while scaling the network to support over 18K GPUs within the cluster. Can you go to a super spine configuration to scale further? James argued against it given the additional complexity and latency of such a configuration.
Finally, we looked at network analytics and how Juniper tools help network operations administer given new network requirements. Kyle Baxter walked us through how telemetry data is ingested into Apstra using Juniper’s custom telemetry collector aimed at IT admins. The telemetry collector offers a code free way to oversee the network in flight which also integrates an option for command line interface control. The key takeaway was that continual telemetry data feeds across network nodes provides Apstra’s ability to maintain management of all network resources while providing administrators the tools to sort data into meaningful information about the network.
The TechArena takeaway?
Apstra is a fantastic jump forward in simplifying network management, and we’re keen to see how Juniper continues down the path for true multi-vendor support across network infrastructure providers. We’re curious if Juniper sees Apstra only as a companion product of Juniper switch engagements or as a true standalone management console regardless of switch deployment. We’re also excited to see more progress from Juniper and the entire ethernet ecosystem with the advancement of ethernet for AI clusters including movement from the Ultra Ethernet Alliance and its new collaboration with the Open Compute Project.