The summit
This week I spent time at the Juniper Ambassador Summit. This summit is designed for people who use, deploy and administrate Juniper environments. I was invited into this program last year and since has received a lot of information about Juniper. Ranging from webinars with technical engineers, new product releases to UX design and next-gen feature workshops there is a lot happening. Once a year Juniper wrangle all the ambassadors to Sunnyvale, California to press the flesh in person and have a mini conference. It is almost like a single vendor tech field day for a comparison.
Presentations
The following presentations took place throughout the 2.5 day conference.
- Next Generation QFX & SDN Architectures
- Juniper Strategy Roundtable
- Vision and Direction update from Chris Hoff, CTO
- DDOS mitigation on a global scale
- Analytics, Automation and the Network that Knows
- Certification/Education roundtable
- Security update
- Firewall deployment scenarios
- Daily Motions network architecture
- S3BU Engineering forum
* MX updates - How Meijer uses Junos Space
- How Juniper can win in the whitebox switch world
- Firefly updates
- OpenCLOS updates
- Automating Firefly Perimeter
I am going to cover off what I can as individual posts because there was SO much content. I am waiting to collect decks and my notes as there was mostly whiteboard content (which rocks). There are some sessions I will avoid or be vague on due to NDA.
Networking
This event was fantastic for my personal and professional networking. Whilst I knew a lot of the ambassadors on the social front through The Twitters, I never got to see them in real life. It was great to chat and talk to people in real life, talk about their problem spaces and it was refreshing to hear I am not the only person with certain issues.
There are some very smart cookies in this group – about 5 CCIE and 10 JNCIE certifications. It is pretty cool chatting to these guys about the networks they work on, problems they face and study tips. I spent a lot of time with people I’ve seen pass CCIE and JNCIE certifications. Hanging around them is inspiring and also encouraging that I am getting closer to my goals.
A Thank You
This is a thank you to Julie Wider of Juniper Networks. She organised this event down to the last detail. It was extremely comfortable, plesent, action packed and there was great benefit gained from the event. Thank you for looking after us all and ensuring we had everything we needed. You made the PTO time off for this even worth it tenfold.
Disclaimer
Whilst I am a Juniper Ambassador and my trip are paid for by Juniper I am in no way obliged to write about them favourably or at all. There are no requirements of the program to produce vendor favorable material and anything I write is my opinion.