nanog mailing list archives

Re: Open Souce Network Operating Systems


From: Hugo Slabbert <hugo () slabnet com>
Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2018 15:48:47 -0800


On Wed 2018-Jan-17 23:11:14 +0000, Matthew Smee <matthew.smee () sydney edu au> wrote:

Yeah, it'd be silly for organisations to try and standardise their environments for services or infrastructure.

I'm somewhat in two minds there. Options to tackle operational complexity/expense:

Option 1: Require a homogeneous environment or minimize vendors/platforms as much as possible.

Option 2: Accept vendor/platform diversity as inevitable and build systems/abstractions around that.

Is #1 achievable? If you're expending time/effort/resources achieving #1 and fall short, don't you have to do #2 anyway?

Much has also been said on monocultures in infrastructure: having a single bug impact all of your gear sucks. If I can manage a pair of border routers, for instance, from two different vendors in an abstracted/consistent enough manner that I don't deal with their idiosyncrasies on a daily basis, am I not better off than running a single platform / code train in that function?

--
Hugo Slabbert       | email, xmpp/jabber: hugo () slabnet com
pgp key: B178313E   | also on Signal

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Digital signature


Current thread: