In the world of networking, Juniper’s Junos operating system powers some of the largest and most demanding enterprise and service provider networks out there. Whether it’s the flagship T, MX, and PTX series routers that power ISPs, the enterprise-friendly EX series switches and SRX series firewalls or data center QFX-series, the aspect that remains in common in Junos is the operating system originally based on BSD Unix.
What Juniper has capitalized on, however, is a universal configuration management framework that powers all of the varied aspects of Junos and that is based on inter-communication using XML. The choice of XML puts Junos in a prime position for integrating its capabilities into larger systems by exposing its XML machine-to-machine interfaces—so-called RPCs or Remote Procedure Calls—to automation applications.
In this book, we take a recipe-based approach to investigating and exploring the automation technologies surrounding Junos and provide some examples of how to tackle common network requirements.