The other week month I was able to attend Juniper NXTWORK 2019 in Las Vegas, NV. If you are unfamiliar with Juniper NXTWORK, it is the Juniper customer and partner conference that is held all over the world.

This year they offered the traditional JNCIE Lab testing prior to the event as well as a 1.5-day Contrail training session. Since I was not taking a lab this year, I figured I would take the Contrail training class and see what it is all about. It was a nice introduction of Contrail v19 ( they changed the versioning to the year ). I may try to do another post on that later.

I also attended the Hack-A-Thon again this year, and that was a great experience. What I like about Juniper’s Hack-a-Thons is that they focus more on the hacking/security then they do on Juniper products per se. They approach it from a way to learn about security, how to look for things, and what you can do to protect your network. I will try to write more on the Hack-a-Thon in another post.

This year much of the keynote was focused on AI and integration into the Enterprise. This had much to do with the prior acquisition of Mist. I will admit that the integration of Marvis into an enterprise ecosystem has me intrigued. The potential to use Marvis AI to help identify, resolve, and prevent future issues is something that can benefit any network.

Traditionally the Juniper NXTWORK sessions had been light on nerd details, they usually just touched on high-level topic info. It was just enough to get you interested in the topic, but not enough for someone who wants to go deep to be satisfied. This year they added what are called Master Classes. and these went just deep enough where you felt satisfied. I focused a lot on the Mist oriented sessions, and I will be upfront saying that Wireless is not my strong point, but these had been some good sessions. Really glad to see them go deep on the topics.

The NXTWORK After Dark Reception this year was at Omnia Nightclub in Caesars Palace. The place was lit up as RevRun and DJ Ruckus ( we pretended to call him DJ Mist that night ) jammed on all night. The place was lit up in Juniper green to boot!

Below is a quick video of some of the theatrics and partying that was had at the reception. Caution there is some language in the video.

I will have to admit that one of the highlights of the event was actually the Guest Speaker session. Juniper had Magic Johnson give a motivational speech that was off the charts. He engaged with the audience in a way that I have rarely seen – you can tell he was actually having a good time there. Below is a video of his chest-bumping one of the attendees ( he did this to quite a few who engaged as a reward.)

One of the best sessions ( little bias though ), was the session by Christian Scholz on EVE-NG. The turnout for this session was amazing. Christian talked about and demoed all the things that you can do with EVE-NG when it comes to studying, learning, and proving out customer networks. Below is a picture that shows the turn-out. It was amazing!

Overall this year was another great NXTWORK in the books. This conference has grown over the years, and I hope that it continues to grow. The pre-event classes are great, the sessions are getting better, the vendors are wonderful, and overall that makes the conference better.

See you at the conference in 2020!

Disclaimer:
I am a Juniper Ambassador and Juniper sponsors us to attend Juniper NXTWORK as a group.  This review is my view only and is not sponsored, endorsed, or influenced by Juniper.  I am not required to write anything and I do of my own free will.