Software Defined Network (SDN) will revolutionize datacenter and cloud networking — if everyone can agree on how to deploy it. Alcatel-Lucent has Nuage; Cisco and a host of other companies have the open-source Project Daylight, amd now Juniper has its own take: Contrail and its open-source brother OpenContrail. Juniper Logo
Contrail, and its open-source counterpart consist of two main components: the Contrail Controller and the Contrail vRouter.
The Contrail Controller is a logically centralized but physically distributed SDN controller that’s in charge of managing, controlling, and running analytics on the virtualized network. This exposes a set of Representational State Transfer (RESTful) application programming interfaces (APIs) to cloud orchestration tools, such as Juju, Chef, and Puppet, and other applications. At present, the Contrail controller works with OpenStack, CloudStack, and IBM’s SmartCloud Orchestrator.