DENVER — Juniper Networks believes that open source is initiating where the broader software and networking industry is heading, Julius Francis, director of product management and marketing for cloud, security, and analytics at Juniper told SDxCentral at this week’s Open Infrastructure Summit. However, there is still a lot of work to be done in open source for customers to be able to implement many of these projects.

The networking company has its hands in a few areas of open source, but its main involvement in the open source community surrounds its open source SDN project, which was renamed Tungsten Fabric when Juniper moved the code-base to the Linux Foundation. It was previously called OpenContrail.

Francis says that the company has stayed on board with Tungsten and continues to contribute because Juniper sees the value of open source.

It is also involved in the Akraino project, which is the Linux Foundation’s open source edge software stack, it supports the Open Compute Project’s (OCP) Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC), and it supports a number of open programmability efforts including OpenConfig, Open/R, and P4.

However, Juniper’s position on open source is evolving. “We understand the right balance, so we try and contribute and move the industry forward with open source, while we look at and accelerate some of the real needs in the industry to move our customers forward as well,” said Francis. “It’s important for the industry to move beyond this experimentation [on the projects] to start delivering them [to customers].”

“The whole idea about that is even though these components are coming from open source, it’s about the pre-validated testing solution,”  based on open source components, he said. Juniper wants to “woo our customers to go beyond experimentation to start deploying. At the end of the day this infrastructure is a means to an end for running revenue-generating services on top.”

So Juniper has begun work to simplify design implementation and the operational aspect of open source, including full lifecycle management, to help monetize the work coming from open source.

One of the recurring discussions at the OpenStack Foundation’s Open Infrastructure Summit was that while there are a lot of projects working on the edge, there needs to be a focus on how to operationalize and manage it.

Francis says the onus is on both these projects and their working groups as well as the vendors to figure this out. Juniper, he said is taking an “operational-first mindset, because our customers want us to have the same operational model, with the agility and flexibility and experience of the telco cloud to the edge.”

The vendor’s telco cloud, Contrail Cloud, is part of its edge play — the Contrail SDN portfolio. The software portfolio also includes offerings for the enterprise data center, the WAN, and the edge (which encompasses base stations, hub sites, and switching sites. Juniper calls this its Contrail Edge Cloud.)

“When you think about centralized telco cloud you talk about tens of sites, then you go to the edge, you are talking about tens of thousands of sites,” he said. “Juniper has a broad experience in enabling the hyperscale, massive scale of telco clouds, so for us [it’s] how do we bring that experience in solving this, some of the constraints on the edge.”

It’s about bringing the same toolset, but taking a different approach, Francis explained. “So it is important that as we have a lot more maturity in operationalizing the telco cloud. We have to understand the constraint of the edge and deliver these types of characteristics into our solution.”

This approach includes managing and troubleshooting by placing its performance agent on the distributed side of the network to collect telemetry data and feed it to its centralized controller to perform analytics. And it includes implementing a distributed, virtualized NFV infrastructure (NFVi) layer and centralizing to the operational model.

And the tools will be the same, because “it’s important to have a cohesive toolset that you will be able to operate on,” Francis said. He added that as companies operationalize their telco data centers and have thousands of use case workloads, the ones that rely on the edge will have portions of centralized workloads.

“The distributed telco cloud for Juniper has become a platform for these newer, emerging applications,” he said.

When discussing the future of open source, Francis says there is a lot of potential, particularly in projects like Akraino, but that “if you really look at the edge, there are a lot of things that need to be thought out, and one is the security.”

The reason being that first stage of edge, he says, is considering how to deploy infrastructure services — like virtual RAN and control and user plane separation (CUPS) — so there is a virtualized data plane under each location. This is the responsibility of telecom and services providers, because they have “beach-front properties.”

Bikash Koley, CTO at Juniper, told SDxCentral at MWC Barcelona earlier this year that they have these properties because “they are sitting on central offices that are within milliseconds of most people in large cities that they really haven’t monetized.”

Francis noted that this next stage is monetizing the edge, because these edge locations will need to be opened up so users can co-create with service providers and enterprises to be able to actually deploy workloads on these sites. And to do so providers need to think about workload isolation and Layer 4-Layer 7 security.

For Juniper, this includes working will partners to deploy its virtual SRX security package to secure tunnels when sending traffic to centralized locations. Francis says that Juniper recently introduced a microsegmentation type of context security that will help apply/configure security policies by applying a level of abstraction so the policies follow the workloads through the network.