Multicloud should be accessible for more than the worlds largest cloud providers. Here is how Juniper Networks and Red Hat can make that happen.
The move to hybrid and multicloud environments are more than an exercise in deploying technologies. A switch or a router, or an orchestration or management system. It is not enough to lift and shift an application from on-prem servers to servers in the cloud. This transition represents something more than swapping one technology for another. It is a fundamental change in how enterprises approach IT.
As with any change of this magnitude, success will not likely be determined by the high level objectives, but rather how well nuances, complexities and ground realities are managed.
Like a cloud
Most transitions in technology take time. With cloud, we are not looking at an evolutionary step in isolation. We have customer successes that provide a glimpse into what the possibilities might hold. Customer challenges to deliver new services faster and to create differentiation through technology are indeed solvable – and at scale. We believe the key to navigating this change is democratising cloud grade operations. Merely replicating technology choices without the accompanying shift in operational skill, discipline and culture will not yield great results.
This is because the cloud is more than just technology and also more than just public cloud. Cloud is a new architecture and operational model and hybrid and multicloud architectures can offer customers the greatest flexibility.
Red Hat as an operational change agent
The operational change before us is fundamental. It necessitates agents of change that understand the future, approach innovation in new ways and have the market presence to facilitate the migration to a new way of architecting and operating IT infrastructure.
Red Hat is perhaps one of the best change agents in our industry. Having driven open source to the enterprise, Red Hat has been able to strike at both the technological and cultural barriers to progress, as well as across the technology stack. Whether it is Linux, Ansible, OpenStack, Kubernetes or other open source technologies, Red Hat has become a standard for bringing open source innovation into the enterprise in ways that are designed to make it more consumable, reliable and secure. Juniper believes in the same principles of open source innovation, open APIs, open standards and software defined automated infrastructure.
Of course, no single vendor should be able to drive a movement like this, which is why Juniper and Red Hat are working together to lead this transition to the next era in IT.
Diversity and uniformity
Customers can run workloads on bare metal, in VMs or containers in private clouds or public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud or Microsoft Azure. They can use both proprietary and open source tools to manage workloads, monitor the system, increase security or troubleshoot. The options are seemingly endless.
All of these choices are a good thing, as it gives power back to the customer to adopt the technologies that make the most sense for their organisation, to deploy apps in the best environment for their use or to shift workloads as resource needs change. This is the goal of hybrid and multicloud environments. To enable this diversity of choice, creating a consistent foundation and approach to operational consistency across IT environments is paramount. Operational practices should not have to change in meaningful ways depending on where an application is hosted or for whom a service is deployed. Customers are asking for a simplified operator experience and importantly, that simplification should cut across compute, storage and networking.
Juniper and Red Hat
Juniper’s collaboration with Red Hat is an important step in helping to make this simplification a reality. Our Multicloud Enabler solution combines Juniper’s Contrail Enterprise Multicloud with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat OpenStack Platform. By bringing these products together, we are aiming to simplify the deployment and operation of multicloud infrastructure.
Earlier this year, we announced this initiative. Today, we are pleased to share that the Multicloud Enabler solution powered by Red Hat and Juniper is generally available.
Bikash Koley is Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Juniper Networks. In this role, Bikash is responsible for charting Juniper's technology strategy and for leading and executing the company’s critical technology innovations.
Bikash is an industry-leading expert in software-defined networking (SDN), intent-driven networking, packet-optical integration, warehouse-scale computing, and large-scale data center interconnection.