Juniper networks have always been a fan favorite among the service provider crowd. If we take a step back and look at the service provider vertical, it would make sense that automating network equipments is on the top of their mind. Before the dawn of cloud scale datacenters, service providers were the ones with the most network equipment. A typical enterprise might have a few redundant Internet connection at the corporate headquarter, and have a few remote sites homing the network connectivities back to the headquarters in a hub-and-spoke fashion in order to access headquarter resources, such as mail and databases. But to a service provider, they are the ones who need to build, provision, manage, and troubleshoot these connections and the underlying networks. They make their money by selling the bandwidth along with value-added managed services. It would make sense for the service providers to invest in automation to use the least amount of engineering hour to keep the network humming along, and automation is the key.

In my opinion, the difference between a service provider network needs as opposed to their cloud datacenter counterpart is that traditionally, service providers aggregate more into a single device with added services. A good example would be the Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) that almost all major service providers provide but rarely adapted in the enterprise or datacenter networks. Juniper, as they have been very successful at, has identified this need and excel at fulfilling the service provider requirements of automating. Let's take a look at some of Juniper's automation APIs.