Juniper Networks fleshed out its Cloud Metro strategy, combining automation and artificial intelligence (AI) into a managed offering targeted at service providers battling increased data consumption from their 5G and edge deployments.

The updates include Juniper moving its Paragon Automation software suite into a cloud-based, as-a-service product. Juniper launched Paragon Automation early last year, tapping into its Netrounds acquisition to provide vendor-agnostic software that monitors network services, automation, and resiliency testing.

Brendan Gibbs, VP of automated WAN solutions at Juniper, explained in an interview that it's embedding those monitoring agents into its ACX7000 routers that will then feed that data directly up into the cloud and be managed by a central dashboard.

“The network itself becomes like a sensor for active service assurance,” Gibbs said. “Every device will be able to have this right within the operating system. Every device will become an active sensor for these services.”

This will also feed into the ability to monitor 5G traffic using 3GPP compliant test agents. Gibbs explained that these test agents can be placed in the radio access network (RAN) and can then use the platform’s ability to emulate handset traffic in that environment.

“You can emulate a handset and you can emulate the packet core to monitor the quality of a particular 5G mobility service from end to end,” Gibbs said. “It will mimic the actual path the traffic takes.”

Juniper also launched what Gibbs termed “sustainable systems” based on Juniper’s Junos evolved operating system. This runs on the ACX7000 routers and provides for lower power consumption by switching off unused features, and increased modularity for better space efficiency and longer system lifetime.

The physical hardware also includes a chip inserted during the time its built that uses the Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM 2.0) standard to cryptographically identify each piece of hardware and routes that information back to Juniper. This allows the vendor to monitor if the platform hardware or software has been tampered with and provide security down to the infrastructure layer.

Gibbs said the updates expand on what Juniper announced last year, which he said was more around “the definition of that market space.” That launch was framed around “three core pillars” of new routers, service intelligence, and its Paragon Automation platform.

Gibbs explained that this is based on the need to push network resources to the edge to deal with the growth in network traffic. The vendor is predicting a 500% increase in metro-focused traffic between 2021 and 2027.

“This fundamentally means that you need to change to react to all of these different parameters and changes down in the metro,” Gibbs said.

It also furthers Juniper’s as-a-service push, which also helps customers more quickly deploy new services.

“What we're actually trying to help customers fight against is time,” Gibbs said. “Our value proposition is basically saving them time because a lot of our service that our customers have been doing is kind of the do-it-yourself approach where they build out their own server farms, their own telco cloud infrastructure, their own automation apps. If we can say, hey, why don't you log into the cloud and you can be productive in minutes. They don't have to use it, but if they want to try it, that's where the productivity gains and the time advantages start to be realized.”