Juniper Networks is a company that prides itself on staying ahead of the curve, so it’s no surprise they’ve been working with event-driven architectures and cases since before serverless became a hot trend.
However, after the introduction of AWS Lambda, AWS IoT Core, AWS Greengrass, and the broader adoption of serverless architectures, Juniper wanted to build world-class competency in the emerging serverless and IIoT (industrial IoT) ecosystems through best practice, enterprise-grade design patterns that have been tested at scale.
Focus on code execution over building, planning, and provisioning infrastructure with AWS serverless.
That’s what led Tommy to the Developer Acceleration workshop at Trek10.
“I do a lot of research when it comes to vendors. I was looking for someone who has the right qualifications, who’s been doing this work for a long time, and who has a strong enough relationship with AWS to understand their service roadmaps. After all my research, Trek10 was the best fit.” - Tommy Baum, Lead Architect - Operational Automation at Juniper Networks
Juniper got to work putting together a formidable team of networking experts comprised of coding, network engineering, and field support specialists. The team’s responsibility would be to leverage new AWS serverless and IIoT architectural paradigms to create the Juniper support automation system—a service deployed to reduce resolution time on service tickets—in a performant, scalable, and cost-effective manner.
“The team we pulled together for the Juniper support automation system is extremely competent with a high level of expertise. Our team had to be able to respect the speakers and their ability to communicate and teach with technical mastery. Trek10 was able to command their respect, which says a lot.” - Tommy Baum, Lead Architect - Operational Automation at Juniper Networks
Andy Warzon, CTO at Trek10, was incredibly excited to see the sophistication of Juniper’s plans. “It’s not every day we get the chance to tackle problems like these and push the boundaries of what the cloud is capable of. Juniper is so great to work with.”
At least initially, members of the new team at Juniper had varying degrees of previous serverless and AWS experience. Tommy’s vision was to bring everyone up to the same base level of fluency with serverless implementations.
Trek10 worked with Juniper to design a custom 3-day workshop, directly addressing the cutting-edge architectures Juniper was working with and the problems they were working to solve.
“A program is so much better than a tutorial. We learned best practices from people who use serverless every day, about ideas that seem beneficial on the surface but aren’t in practice, and received lots of advice on how to approach our specific problems in a way that solidified our common vocabulary as a team.” - Tommy Baum, Lead Architect - Operational Automation at Juniper Networks
This shared experience and vocabulary, for Tommy, was a critical part of what the team got out of the workshop. Having a common vocabulary across the team made everyone’s expectations clearer. It made it easier to scope projects. When someone asked someone else to do something, they knew exactly what it meant and what it would take to get it done.
“Networking experts need to be able to speak the language so when they ask somebody to do something, they fully understand the complexities and components of their asks. Even if some members of the team don’t need to become serverless experts for their specific role, they need to be able to work with them well.” - Tommy Baum, Lead Architect - Operational Automation at Juniper Networks
Since the Developer Acceleration training, Tommy has noticed the support automation system team is pushing through new projects with confidence. There’s an energy to the way everyone works together that can be felt throughout the team and seen in the quality of work.
Plus, the AWS serverless space is constantly evolving and changing. The Juniper support automation system team is heavily invested in IIoT, and some desirable AWS Greengrass features launched a couple of months after their workshop with Trek10. With a constant stream of new services and change, Juniper is glad they have a solid foundation and cohesion as a team to move quickly on new opportunities.
They continue to work with Trek10 for ongoing advanced engineering support, operationalization, and enablement to ensure the successful rollout of the support automation system.
“This is a hand-selected team of people who are tackling things that have never been done before. Trek10 gave us the foundation we needed to break new ground.” - Tommy Baum, Lead Architect - Operational Automation at Juniper Networks
