Juniper unveils Contrail Edge Cloud for managing services at the edge

Juniper on Monday is unveiling a new software product to help service providers manage new services at the network edge -- a space subject to physical and power constraints. With the new Contrail Edge Cloud, service providers can more easily deploy and monetize applications at base stations, hub sites or switching sites.

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These sites are prime real estate for launching new, latency-sensitive applications like connected car services or AR/VR applications, said Sally Bament, Juniper's VP of service provider marketing. But given the space and power limitations at edge sites, it'd be impractical to deploy the sort of hardware and software that typically sits in centralized data centers.

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Contrail Edge Cloud addresses that with a software orchestration platform with a low-energy footprint. It extends a full suite of automation, analytics, and security capabilities to the network edge.

Juniper took its traditional Contrail product and repackaged it using Redhat Openstack for distributed computing. Ceph storage offers auto-scaling to the exabyte capacity, while Kubernetes provides the orchestration for containerized applications.

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Contrail Edge Cloud will be available in Q4 of this year.

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