There are several threads here about layoffs at Juniper https://www.thelayoff.com/juniper-networks?sort=active
9 replies (most recent on top)
Friends of SVPs are immune!
Did Cisco eventually do more than CLI and read-only SNMP across all their product lines?
Cisco's CLI isn't even consistent from one card to it's functionally equivalent cost reduced version in the same chassis so that hardly constitutes a replacement for a consistent API.
Providing an abstract interface for devices so a single application can control any "similar" device has been around since at least the early 1970s so we have an upper bound on how new Cisco's software skills are.
I posted the original comment about Arista running a single image. I am not a developer so I will defer to the experts on whether this is truly an advantage in the development process. However, from a user/TAC perspective it was great having all of the Linux tools available and the simple process of bug searching was much easier. At Cisco when you find a bug that is a good candidate for the problem you are seeing, only god knows if it applies to the customer’s code and if it has been fixed in that version until you do more research. These may seem like trivial things, but the TAC is about production and when you are trying to solve 3 or 4 cases a day, they make a big difference.
I don't believe it. Arista runs unmodified Linux?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arista_Networks :
EOS is Arista's network operating system, and comes as one image that runs across all Arista devices[25] or in a virtual machine (VM).[26] EOS runs on an unmodified Linux kernel under a Fedora-based userland.[27]
Once upon a time it was an act of g-d to get the raw kernel sources, gcc and glibc to play together so "unmodified" likely means someone upstream is doing all the integration and they're using someone else's distribution. When I was at Cisco the kernel efforts, both commercial and linux, were so poorly managed they represented auto-asphyxiation more than actual added value.
Not to me. Please elaborate.
It implies they have both a hardware and a software architecture so they don't need to spend massive resources making unique instances of everything (ask SGI how the alternative went.) Cisco has endless incompatible hardware architectures each of which requires hard coding unique software for each board on a platform and spans many branches (at one point IOS released off 500 branches, and when you know how much code was cut and pasted you know how each bug becomes thousands.) I look at what Cisco used to spend on customer found defects and it dwarfs Arista's entire R&D budget.
What follows is having to have ownership of each major component or subsystem, something Cisco knows nothing about, which is why any random person anywhere can check in a change that breaks every other platform on a given operating system, and yes, it's been done. With individual ownership comes standardized APIs, as we can see from the page cited above:
EOS provides extensive application programming interfaces (APIs) to communicate with and control all aspects of the switch.
Did Cisco eventually do more than CLI and read-only SNMP across all their product lines?
unmodified Linux kernel
I don't believe it. Arista runs unmodified Linux? We, Cisco, are a) backporting security and bug fixes, b) have kernel drivers for our npus, c) tune some kernel code towards our needs.
The advantage of a single binary image should be self evident.
Not to me. Please elaborate. On a high level, it's a good idea to tune the OS towards different needs: DC, SP, Enterprise and having independent release schedules. No?
In response to the post on Arista. I worked at Cisco for 18 years and at Arista for 4 years before retiring. The two biggest differences I saw were that Arista has a single code base running on an unmodified Linux kernel and they view the TAC as a vital component of their business. I worked in the TAC so my views may be narrow in focus, but it appeared to me that the customers loved the fact that a TAC engineer answered the phone and that developers would get on Zoom calls quickly. The advantage of a single binary image should be self evident.
Juniper Employees have bigger fish to fry than layoffs this morning. :(
Are you all paying attention to Arista? They've been crushing the cloud market but now they are doing the same to the enterprise. Somehow they are finding customers that are not interesting in prioritizing subscriptions over product capabilities and performance. Weird concept.
No one is immune from layoffs. Cisco is no different from anywhere else.