Though contrail is a failed endeavor, it is Juniper's new direction. Cloud workload orchestration. From data to computer to ... storage (with fungible).
Let's take a step back and ask ourselves what exactly is contrail? If you want to sell contrail, the pride and joy of juniper's cloud solutions, you need to know what it is right? if you ask what contrail really does, what technical or business problem it solves, and who buys it?... you will get a myriad of answers.
My guess is, you will hear everything from 'The Contrail Controller is an open cloud network automation product that uses SDN to orchestrate the creation of virtual networks with high scalability' to 'contrail brings together a scale-out framework and physical routers and switches to scale infrastructures beyond the data center of cloud boundaries in order to offer workload mobility in a hybrid environment', and ' the purpose of Contrail is to deploy the cloud — public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud — and to automate network functions virtualization with service chaining.' ...
And when you ask who buys it? And why? You will get ...
'Contrail can be used by service providers to speed up the deployment of services, or by enterprises to enhance business agility. As a platform that uses Juniper’s OpenStack distribution for cloud orchestration and automation, Contrail aims to offer security, availability, performance, and flexibility in networking. In its product datasheet, it defines the controller as a “scale-out cloud native software with container-based microservices architecture that supports in-service upgrades.”
The truth is no one has a clear answer. There us a reason for the vague answers. The dead giveaway here is when you hear... SPs CAN use contrail and enterprises CAN do blah blah blah. That just goes to show there are NO customers. No deployments. The fact that these goons are peddling vaporware and slideware is obvious. These teams have no idea how this product can even be deployed, leave alone solve business problems. There are no use cases and who would buy vaporware?
Ask around. It's fun. All this glibberish won't sell contrail products.
Looking beyond all this, if you were to sell contrail, the business unit (BU), to anyone, where do you draw the line? If you want to sell "Contrail BU" to another company, what would you include? does it include vMX/vSRX and NFX and the contrail cloud orchestrator? It gets complicated pretty fast.
This is why Contrail, the product is a hard sell. Nobody knows what it is and what it does. No one can clearly articulate what it does, who will buy it, and how you can buy it. These are the basic questions usually answered by marketing. Sadly we have failed to answer these questions clearly and succinctly and bringing in apformix and htbase just muddied the waters some more.
So, no product, no customers, therefore there is no opportunity to sell the solution to some else, and after all this is the new direction for juniper.
In summary, if you are not in any groups associated with Contrail in the name or solution, I would be worried about the layoff, but since the solution is not clear, it is hard to tell if your product is critical for juniper's new mission to solve all cloud workload problems.