The Visionaries: A Viewpoint on the Future From Networking Legends | Juniper Global Summit

0:15 -Hi, I’m Maribel Lopez, the founder, and principal analyst at Lopez Research. I’m thrilled to be here today joined

0:22 with such amazing and disparate luminaries. Today we have with us, David Cheriton, Bob Friday, Kireeti Kompella, and Andy Ory.

0:32 Why don’t we get started with introductions? David, tell us a little bit about yourself.

0:37 -Well, let’s see I was a professor at Stanford in computer science and started the first networking course there 40 years ago,

0:46 and since then, I’ve taught networking and distributed systems. I’ve also been involved in founding several

0:54 networking companies and most recently, I was the founder and CEO of Apstra that was doing network

1:01 automation, that got recently acquired by Juniper, so here I am.

1:06 -Wonderful, Bob. -Yes, Bob Friday. Yes, so I started my career in the wireless network back

1:12 in the ‘80s when the FCC came up with the unlicensed spectrum rules. I send them a Christmas card every year, saying thank you.

1:18 This whole career’s dedicated to the FCC and those rules. From there, I went on to basically do a nationwide

1:24 mesh network at Ricochet Metricom long before cellular. After that, I went off and started a company called Airespace,

1:31 which was really focused on enterprise and helping them manage the beginnings of these Wi-Fi networks they were deploying.

1:37 I was at Cisco for eight years, and build the CTO and then went off and started Mist, which was really focused on this cloud-AI paradigm shift.

1:46 From there I sold Mist to Juniper two years ago and now I’m at Juniper and here with you today.

1:52 -Great. Kireeti, share. -Hi, my name is Kireeti Kompella. I started at Juniper 24 years ago,

2:01 in the fifth sub-basement, writing kernel code. I crawled my way up out of there and started working on routing

2:09 protocols going to standards bodies, going to the IETF, got interested in advancing that routing standards,

2:19 but moved on to the last five years, where I’ve been talking about self-driving networks

2:25 and the technologies that we need to get there. Now I’m working on a project that is

2:31 a building block for the self-driving network. Happy to be here. -Thank you. We’re excited to have you.

2:38 Andy, let’s round it out with you. -Yes, I’ve been involved, like Bob, since the ‘80s in communication infrastructure.

2:45 I’m a serial entrepreneur, and I’ve started and successfully grown three different businesses.

2:51 We’ve engaged in deploying products in 110 different countries, and my latest business 128 Technology,

2:58 that I was a co-founder of, is now part of Juniper Networks and it really is a combination of trying to realign the connected world

3:06 from what it was used for, to how it is being used, and anticipating its future use,

3:12 in a way that can impact business outcome to create enterprise value. -Okay, I think that this is great that we have so many people

3:21 representing so many different parts of the stack here. Speaking of the stack, I’ve been in networking

3:26 and telecom and district for a long time. In that space, I think we’ve come to the point where a lot

3:32 of people talk to me and they say, "Hey, isn’t this a commodity? Is there anything really interesting going on with networking?"

3:40 I’d like to pose that question to this panel. Is that true? Do we feel that it’s over in the networking phase?

3:48 What should organizations be doing right now? Maybe we can start with you, Andy.

3:55 -Sure, there’s never been more change in networking than there is today.

4:00 Between the movement to the cloud, the connection of wireless networks, mobility, the importance of security,

4:06 and this whole notion of digital transformation and engagement. We’ve all, unfortunately, lived it over the last 12 months,

4:14 but it is just facilitating massive change. I think that you can look at parts of networking

4:20 that are commoditized and the market values that one way, and you can look at the part of networking that is fundamental

4:26 and strategic to what enterprises are trying to engage in, and that’s highly valued.

4:31 I tend to want to skate to where things are valuable and strategic because I think that means they’re exciting.

4:37 -All right, so you think networking is hot? Anybody not thinking networking is hot? Anybody think it should be different?

4:42 David, what’s your perspective on this? -I think that networking is a little boring at one level,

4:49 And we’re converged around Ethernet. we’re converged around IP, and a lot of stuff has converged compared

4:57 to the diversity of network technologies we had years ago.

5:03 One of the things that has also changed is,

5:08 as Andy mentioned, that the network really is the foundation for digital transformation.

5:14 I like that metaphor in the sense that all the digital transformation sits on the network.

5:19 The metaphor breaks down because this foundation can fall through the ground very quickly.

5:26 To me, one of the exciting pieces is that we’re dealing with,

5:31 not a piece of concrete, but a complex set of interacting components that are

5:37 doing trillion things a second, and when things go wrong, your foundation falls apart.

5:43 To me, the exciting part is making that foundation as reliable as a skyscraper foundation.

5:51 -I love that concept. You need a foundation to build on. It looks like Kireeti [crosstalk]-- -I’m going to pick up on what David just said because

5:57 I’m going to take an analogy with the power networks, the distribution of power to our houses.

6:06 Back about a hundred years ago, there was this big fight about whether we should use DC or AC.

6:15 You can read all about it, but in the end, we did shift to AC. We run 110 volts here, over in Europe there are 220 volts.

6:25 There was a lot of excitement, a lot of stuff going on there, but it’s all settled down.

6:30 The fact that it settled down might mean that it’s a commodity and it’s boring.

6:37 What it does mean for me is, I don’t worry about, "What plugs do I carry?

6:45 Does my thing work on 110 or 220 when I’m traveling?"

6:50 I think it would be great for networking for the end-user to get a little bit more boring,

6:56 where I don’t really worry about how I would get my connectivity when I got there. I just have your big participant

7:02 connectivity. It would be good connectivity. Behind the scenes, there could be a lot of stuff going on.

7:10 What we’re having today is trying to manage solar power, wind power, coal-based power, and manage it in the right way,

7:20 but for the user, I just take my stuff. I don’t think about it. I don’t worry is it 50 Hertz or 110 volts,

7:28 I just plug it in and it works. The one thing you shouldn’t do is try to hammer your plug into a socket of a different kind.

7:35 If you just get the right socket converter, you’re fine. Can we get there with networking?

7:42 We’re far from there now. I think it would be nice for the end-users

7:48 for networking to be a little more boring. -Not boring enough is what I’m hearing.

7:55 -For me, Maribel, when I look at this, I think at this in the context of evolution. If you look over this, my lifetime of the last 30 years

8:02 of working in networking, we’ve gone from internet, no mobility. When I started,

8:08 I was happy to have a 9.8 Kilobit per second internet connection. If you look at evolution,

8:15 the networking is like a living organism, is evolving quicker now than it ever has in the last 100 years.

8:20 We’ve gone from almost no mobility to we’re now almost 70% of all our internet traffic is over some mobile connection.

8:27 If you look where we’re headed in the future, we’re connecting more things. When I look at networking right now, we’re just evolving

8:35 from workloads that were in the enterprise space. All those workloads are now distributed across data centers everywhere.

8:41 If you look in the future right now, networking is going to be evolving faster than what we’ve seen over the last 30 years.

8:47 For me, it’s far from a commodity. It’s an evolving organism that is evolving faster than we’ve ever seen.

8:53 -What I really love about what I’m hearing here is we’ve gotten everything from network being the foundation, which is true,

8:59 to being a living, breathing organism that is constantly evolving, which makes a lot of sense,

9:04 and is what you need for your business right now. It’s never been clearer that agility is the name of the game,

9:10 so creating that foundation that can also be agile is extremely important. I know in several discussions of having each of you in the past,

9:17 we’ve talked a little bit about that agility and that adaptive nature. What should organizations be doing right now, if that’s the case?

9:26 Bob, what do you think people should be doing right now? -For me, in my career vastly,

9:32 the latest transition I’ve seen going on is really this transition from 20 years ago when I was doing networking.

9:39 It was all about helping people manage their devices’ elements. I think right now we’re starting to see this transition

9:46 where it’s really managing this end-to-end experience. It’s no longer good enough to just manage the AP, the router,

9:53 the switch, or the device in your home if you’re a consumer. It’s really, what you care about is, "What is

9:58 my internet connection real experience like?" That’s really the end-to-end user experience.

10:03 When I talk to people, it’s more about connectivity because we’re seeing things get much more distributed.

10:09 The days where everything was self-contained, those days are over with. Now, we have applications in devices running very distributed

10:16 that we’re trying to connect to over the network. Our problem is really, "How do you manage these connections?"

10:21 and not so much about managing the elements in the network. That’s when I talk to people, it’s more about how to deal

10:27 with the complexity of the network that’s growing around you now. -Kireeti, what are you hearing?

10:34 -I think this drives into the previous question.

10:39 If you can make networking boring for the end-user, in the sense that they don’t have to worry about,

10:45 "Which power am I connected to?", to Rob’s point about, we are all mobile,

10:50 what frequency should my mobile connection be connected at?

10:56 If you can take-- Your phone will just work and your connection would be just fine.

11:03 It’ll adapt to the bandwidth that’s available. Behind the scenes, there’s going to be a lot of things happening,

11:09 so that that experience of the user is getting is actually met.

11:15 That’s the dichotomy. For the user, things should be easy, should be maybe boring.

11:25 They should have very little to do. What’s behind that should say, "I’m going to be constantly

11:32 adjusting things so that that user’s experience is great." That constantly adjusting could be done by a human,

11:39 but also could be done with the help of automation. That combination of a human overseeing it,

11:47 automation doing the heavy-lifting, but the end-user getting the experience that they want, if we’re

11:54 in that place, then we’re so much better off than we are today. We’re moving in that direction, but we’re not there yet.

12:02 -Can I jump in here? Slightly, you said what should organizations be doing now?

12:09 I believe we’re facing a bit of a crisis here because there’s not enough

12:16 skilled network operator engineers to operate the growing set of networks.

12:22 There’s 30 to 40 years of evidence that most of the failures are caused by human error.

12:29 As we said, the network is the foundation and we’re still operating networks

12:35 at the level that we used to operate cars when we adjusted the spark advance, if people know what that means.

12:44 We’ve got to get out of this and the answer has to be automation. There’s no other option on the table.

12:51 I think there’s significant progress being made in how we automate networks. This is not your grandmother’s

12:58 network management where all it does is throw up information and you’re supposed to make sense of it.

13:05 This is trying to take over the configuration, the monitoring, the root cause identification of what’s going on with the network.

13:14 I believe we’re at this point where we can automate this and we can dramatically improve the operation of the network,

13:22 and improve the experience of somebody running a network, which right now, is the pretty horrible one because you’re basically

13:30 on call 24/7 to solve inscrutable problems. It’s hard to stay married.

13:38 -If I can add on to that, David, I agree with you. I just think it’s important that we understand what

13:44 it is we’re trying to automate and what our goal is. From some perspective, a network is a cost center,

13:49 and when asked how is the network performing for the organization, you can look at link status, you can look it up-time, and you can say here’s how it’s performing.

13:56 I think that all of us on this bridge think that networks can also be strategic, that can be value drivers for an organization.

14:04 For that to be the case, networks need to be able to do something they can’t do today. They need to be able to understand who is

14:10 using it and what they’re trying to accomplish, and what else they could be doing that would help the business

14:16 strategically become more competitive, more profitable, more valuable. I think that as we automate, it’s important

14:24 that we capture or encompass what the strategic role of the network could be and what the business is trying to accomplish.

14:32 -I think we’re starting to hear a lot about this in the telecom sector where they’ve been talking about

14:38 network embedded services, but it looked like David wanted to follow up on that point.

14:43 -Well, I just want to say the I agree with Andy, but I hope we can all appreciate

14:51 that when you add these extra requirements on the network, you’re complicating it further.

14:57 When you say, "Understanding what applications are doing," if you understand it wrong you can make things worse.

15:05 I think that these are double-edged swords and we have to make

15:11 sure automation is swinging the sword in the right direction. Many of the things we might talk about of automation

15:19 may not be completely ready to deploy today, but what I see is a lot of organizations have

15:26 just not prepared themselves to automate. They are not thinking about, "What should

15:32 we be automating, and what tools are available, what do we expect is going to be feasible down the line, and

15:38 how do we get from here to there so we’re not blindsided when this technology is really taking off and our competitors are using it?"

15:49 -Maribel, for those who know me, for me, automation, this AI/ML,

15:54 is really the next ultimate step in this automation phase. If you look at cars being able to self-drive or anything,

16:02 that same concept applies to networking so where we can actually start building things that can actually do things on par with humans.

16:08 Automation is really just that concept. AI/ML is just really taking that automation to the next level.

16:14 Now we’re going to start doing things on par with network domain experts. I think that is the next part where we’re headed is,

16:21 "How do we bring that automation, especially with the complexity of the networking we’re starting to see around us?"

16:26 As Andy points out, these networks are becoming much more strategic to businesses. In our early days,

16:33 a business had all its network inside its firewall. Nowadays, if the internet goes down, their business stops.

16:39 That internet connectivity, wherever these workloads are running, they have to keep that networking up and running

16:44 for their business to stay up and running nowadays. That’s the complexity that AI/ML is going to help start dealing with more and more now.

16:53 -I think that gets us to the next step, whereby not only controlling the complexity within the network,

17:01 we can actually take the complexity out of other systems, starting with humans who are using this network.

17:08 Someone saying, "Oh, I wish I had gotten that higher tier of bandwidth because I’m not getting the connectivity that I need."

17:18 Instead, the network realizes this person is using an app

17:23 that needs more bandwidth and makes more bandwidth available.

17:29 Response to not even the stated intent but the real intent to making apps easier

17:38 to write because apps today have to keep looking at the network and think, "What do I need to do in the network to keep up?

17:45 Oh, I’m seeing that there’s some packet drops so I’m going to adjust. You have this variable encoding of video, and I’m going

17:54 to adjust in real-time to what’s going on in the network." If the network could do that response, then the app can be simpler.

18:02 By taking on that complexity and solving it in the network,

18:07 the complexity for the user trying to understand all the different knobs that they have to be able to deal

18:13 with changes in the network or in the apps, that goes away and we move that to the layer where it really belongs.

18:21 The network has to be ready to say, "I understand what’s going on and I can respond." David’s point is very valid.

18:31 If you start doing a lot of automation, it can cut both ways. If it cuts in this direction and cuts the complexity of the users

18:40 of the network, whether they’re human or applications, it will move the industry forward at huge steps.

18:48 -I love where everybody’s going with this because we’re looking at automation, we’re looking at AI,

18:53 we’re starting to tee up what the future is. I think both Bob and Kireeti, you started to tee up what the future is.

18:59 I’m going to ask you to go one click deeper. Maybe since you were already going, Kireeti.

19:04 Your role is interesting because you look at the 3, 5, 10. When you’re looking at the 5 and the 10,

19:11 what are you thinking about? What do you think the audience should be thinking about? -Bob just mentioned it quickly, this notion of self-driving.

19:20 Today, we’re looking at a lot of self-driving cars. We started back in 2004, with a challenge,

19:28 a grand challenge from DARPA, and said, "Can we build a car that completely runs itself?" At that time, it was, "Wow, you guys are completely nuts."

19:36 Here we are on the cusp of it. It’s still not there, which means that the last bit is still difficult.

19:44 The idea that you have a self-driving car was going to change the automobile industry so completely.

19:52 I think that we can do the same with networks, and we can start in places where it’s a little easier and say,

19:59 "Can I build a network that will do everything that typically humans do to manage that network,

20:06 to bring up new services, to recognize. the customers and make sure that they’re getting what they need?"

20:12 Then maybe go beyond that, anticipate, and do that in an environment that’s relatively simple,

20:20 but then do that across the entire network. This idea that you have an effort that completely runs itself,

20:27 maybe the same way that 10 years ago, 15 years ago,

20:32 the idea of a car that completely ran itself would have been nuts. I think that’s very real,

20:37 and that’s a tangible target that we could go after.

20:42 We are in places, but there are a lot of missing technologies.

20:48 Just as in self-driving cars, there’s this big question of,

20:54 "Do I use cameras, stereo cameras, or do I use LIDAR?" In some driving networks, we have the same question.

21:02 "What is the best source of telemetry because if I don’t have the right telemetry, at the right time with the right quality,

21:08 I can’t make good decisions." We are walking this path, but I think the end of it,

21:16 at least for me, is a network that runs itself. If you go back to the original question of commodity,

21:23 well, from the point of view of the user of the network, if the network is just running by itself and

21:30 giving me what I need, the network itself is not commoditized, but from the user’s point of view, it’s really easy.

21:38 Maybe that’s where you should go. -We talked about this whole--

21:43 People have a lot of data but isn’t the right data. Maybe there’s a role for you to help them

21:49 get to more of the root cause of things versus the myriad of alarms and alerts and data

21:57 and whatever that we were talking about. Bob, I don’t know where you wanted to go with it. -I was going to go with, I make a barrel of wine every year.

22:05 Good wine starts with good grapes. Good AI starts with good data. It’s all about data. I mean that’s the first stepping stone to getting there.

22:13 -[crosstalk] too. Yes. -But I think-- -I can keep you there if you give me the line.

22:20 -I think there’s a challenge here which is that,

22:25 to me, the worst-case scenario that you want to deal with in automation is when something goes

22:32 wrong, you want to identify that as root cause, identify what is the root of the problem as quickly as possible.

22:40 What I see right now is, these people are collecting large amounts of data and then thinking they’re going to process it later and that,

22:47 by definition, pushes it further down the pike, so to speak.

22:52 To me, that’s where you want to turn this whole process around and say,

22:57 "I want to have a diagnostic engine that’s processing the data in real-time, and the diagnostic engine needs to know what it needs

23:05 to know, and that drives the data collection." The reality is that data collection in a network

23:13 is expensive and, of course, the time you’re going to need it most is when things are under peak load,

23:20 and that’s also the time where you’re most likely to have failures, and you’re most likely to have the most expensive failures.

23:28 Being highly selective there is going to be an extremely valuable direction to take things.

23:36 That’s where I’ve been interested in more of the medical diagnosis kind of approach

23:41 to root cause identification where you know what symptoms you’re looking for

23:47 to identify certain problems, so you know what telemetry you need to get. In some cases, you can collect the telemetry on-demand

23:56 once you’ve narrowed it down just like doctors have to do. They don’t get to perform every medical test in the book

24:02 before they do diagnosis. -My only point though is that I think that automation is incredibly

24:10 important, making things simple is incredibly important but, again, it’s only half of the equation.

24:15 You could make things cost less, you could make things appear with a smaller footprint, but if it’s not driving value,

24:23 it’s purely a cost-centric model. I think that many folks who are watching this would be very happy to pay twice as much as what they’re paying

24:31 right now for their network and hire more people if they could if they can create five times the enterprise value.

24:37 I do think that the business outcome aspect is really important to make sure it’s a focus on simplicity and automation.

24:46 -I agree with Andy. Ultimately this is all about trying to make sure that businesses can get their job done.

24:53 I would say, back to the data telemetry question, when I started Mist, it was actually kind of inspired by the Watson playing

25:00 Jeopardy, being able to answer questions on par as humans.

25:06 Like I told you, I make a barrel of wine, so the old saying is, "Great wine starts with great grapes."

25:12 Great AI starts with great data. I look at the problem right now, and I agree with David on the telemetry thing.

25:18 When we started Mist, it was all about making sure we built an architecture that could process data in real-time,

25:24 and that was the big difference from what I did 20 years ago, is we really didn’t have data pipelines.

25:29 We took data and we stored it away into some database. Nowadays, you want to process that data in real-time as it comes in.

25:35 The question is, what do you have to do with that data to get to that root cause? This where I say it’s like the Jeopardy thing.

25:44 Depending what questions or what root cause you’re trying to answer, it takes a whole bunch of different algorithms.

25:50 That self-driving car is not one magical algorithm that drives that car. It’s a whole bunch of complex systems that is driving that car.

25:56 For me, that’s where I think we’re headed right now, is basically leveraging these AI/ML algorithms

26:01 that lets us do things that we couldn’t do 20 years ago. Twenty years ago, I couldn’t do anomaly detection because we didn’t have the fancy math.

26:09 Nowadays, we can do the fancy math that makes anomaly detection actually really work with low false positives.

26:15 I think that’s where we’re headed right now with trying to be able to process data real-time, and it does start with the data.

26:21 You got to have the right data to actually answer the question. -Okay, so I wanted to see if we can stretch it just a bit down the road.

26:29 Andy, any thoughts on what’s next after that?

26:35 -Fundamentally, you’re almost asking what’s the next disruption as opposed to what’s the next innovation?

26:40 I think that we’re all talking about complexity, and as systems become complicated, innovations are harder and matter less.

26:49 Whereas a disruption resets the system, making it inherently less complicated and allows for a faster pace of subsequent innovations, in my perspective.

26:58 I happen to think that the anticipatory side-- When I think of machine learning, I think of adaptation,

27:03 but when I think of AI, I think of anticipation. I think that the extent to which we could really create a robust

27:10 anticipatory paradigm, we would see real subsequent innovation.

27:16 I think that it’s AI in its truest sense, something that doesn’t have a quantifiable ROI in terms of taking

27:24 our trouble tickets or mean time to resolutions to zero, but something that would actually provide

27:30 insight to us that is completely different from the kind of insight we’re getting today

27:35 from our complex systems. -I call this right time experiences, the right information,

27:42 to the right person or service, at the right moment. I think we’ve been moving down that path for a while,

27:48 but to Bob and David and Kireeti’s point, we’ve had some interesting technology steps we had to make along the way to get there.

27:56 Computing has obviously gotten better, we’ve moved into the AI era with GPUs and virtualization.

28:03 Is there anything else we should be thinking about in computing? -Well, the idea that Andy just articulated,

28:10 you could take that further. A lot of people talk about intent-based

28:15 networking, and so you have a stated intent, and then you’re going to move the network to meet that intent.

28:25 When you get to the anticipatory stuff, you have either an unstated intent, so don’t do what I say, do what I’m thinking.

28:36 You have to tease out what is it that this person was trying to do, and then prepare the network for that.

28:44 Or you might have an intent that is a repeating intent, and it might not be repeating in time,

28:50 but there’s some triggers that say, this is what they need. If you can get to the point where the network can adjust to what

28:59 is needed without that thing that’s needed being explicitly stated, then, again, you’ve really moved the network industry far.

29:10 Again, this comes back to, "Is the customer happy?" If the customer says, "Wow, this is almost reading

29:17 my mind and preparing the network for what I’m doing, or just making my life easier,"

29:25 then the relationship between that user and the network becomes so much better.

29:33 -I don’t know if it’s bad if I can disagree with some of my panelists here.

29:39 I’ve been involved with networking for 40 years, I hate to admit, and there’s always been these proposals

29:45 to add various functionality to networks, and yet I don’t think they’ve really gone any place. We’re stuck with it.

29:53 Just basically Ethernet packets flowing around perhaps dressed up with IP Clos on them and so on, and yet,

30:00 you come down to this aspect that, in terms of business value, the business value is that it’s there and you can depend on it.

30:09 We talk about this as a foundation, but it’s this whole collection of complex pieces that are operating with trillions of events a second.

30:18 To me, we’ve got a huge task just to get it to the point that it’s a solid foundation.

30:27 The solution over the last 40 years to applications

30:32 and so on is just to throw more bandwidth at it. When I got in this business, there was kilobit networking,

30:39 we went to 3-megabit Ethernet, to 10-megabit Ethernet, to 100-megabit Ethernet,

30:45 a gigabit, 100-gigabit, on and on and on. I remember some optical guy telling me, "Well,

30:52 people think that optical has got infinite bandwidth, but actually it’s only about 30 terabits of usable bandwidth."

31:01 We got lots of space to grow capacity, what we can’t tolerate is when it just comes to a halt,

31:08 or even what calls a great failure. Now, I think over the next five years, it’s going to be

31:14 transformation, being able to identify root causes of faults.

31:19 What that’s going to do is bring down the mean time to repair significantly, but the remaining tall pole in the tent is going

31:27 to be, "How long does it take to repair something?" I think once we brought this tall pole down, we’re

31:33 going to be looking at techniques to build in redundancy in the networks so that we can adapt

31:39 in real-time, that is, we can auto remediate. I think that’s when we get into a foundation

31:45 that deserves the name foundation. -Well, I think that’s a great point to close on,

31:51 creating a foundation that is rock solid and will deliver business value for you going forward, trying

31:58 to evolve it so that’s contextual adaptive learning, and predictive but once you’ve created that solid foundation.

32:04 Thank you so much for your time and attention, and I’m sure all the panelists are thrilled

32:10 that you shared this time with us here today. Thank you. [music]