The Juniper Cloud-Native Router (JCNR) is a container-based software solution that combines the JCNR-controller (cRPD-based control plane) and the JCNR vRouter (DPDK-enabled forwarding/data plane). With the cloud-native router, you can enable Junos OS-based switching control with enhanced forwarding capabilities.

The JCNR controller, running on a Kubernetes (K8s) compute host, provides control plane management functionality and uses the forwarding capabilities provided by either the Linux kernel or the DPDK-enabled JCNR vRouter.

DPDK is an open source set of libraries and drivers. It enables fast packet processing by allowing network interface cards (NICs) to send direct memory access (DMA) packets directly into an application's address space. The applications poll for packets to avoid the overhead of interrupts from the NIC. integrating the DPDK allows a vRouter to process more packets per second than is possible when the vRouter runs as a kernel module.

In this integrated solution, the JCNR Controller uses gPRC-based services to exchange messages and to communicate with the JCNR vRouter, thus creating a fully functional Cloud Native Router.

This close communication allows you to:
-Learn about fabric and workload interfaces
-Provision DPDK or kernel-based interfaces for K8s pods as needed
-Configure IPv4 and IPv6 address allocation for Pods. Furthermore, it incorporates a versatile Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Gateway feature that's ideally suited for both enterprise and telecom networks.