e.g., from simple things like hard drives in a raid from different vendors, to n-version programming in safety critical systems (like airplanes).
Same with Juniper. (there aren't really other viable options besides those two)
You could build the same site fully independently with all-Cisco on one, and all Juniper on another, and potentially get some better isolation from vendor faults, but at very high expense.
You end up with much worse reliability if you have a mixed Cisco/Juniper network without a lot of additional isolation otherwise.
Total misconception. BGP, OSPF, ISIS, LISP, etc. are all non proprietary. Sure, the root cause of this particular problem is that CF is using something specific to Juniper, however router interoperability is not predicated on components like that. This example was a tool CF operationalized, and likely had little to do with their routing with the exception of it being a metric they may have influenced routes with.
People who have all Cisco or all Juniper shops namely do it from a cost perspective. Sure, there are some reasons outside of that but it's likely the big driver. The more you buy, the more you save. And the network sales realm is royally messed up to begin with. I've seen Juniper give 90% discounts on hardware just to break into a Cisco shop. But, the reality of the situation is that all of this gear is marked up well into the thousands of percent. So if you're not getting, minimally 50% then your probably not doing yourself due diligence.
There are some routing protocols which interoperate (which is how different sites on the Internet can talk to each other), but most of the protocols used for HA or management of a given set of routers, or, more importantly, most tested/debugged implementations of HA and device management, are Cisco or Juniper specific.
No big deal announcing routes to your upstream if you use Juniper and they use Cisco. Big deal if you have Cisco+Juniper and want to do HSRP (Cisco-only).
I've been hearing this for a decade. It's still not true. I'm not sure why, either.
I agree the right choice today is almost certainly a C or J router and probably C or A switches, but e.g. hardware load balancers like F5 seem to be losing out to software in most deployments (increasingly).
I built a decent sized network with Zebra 15y ago, which was pretty obviously the wrong tech, but interesting.
most service provider networks manage via the CLI (generally scripted, for better or worse) and occasionally a vendor-specific API.
while I will agree juniper and cisco are generally the best choice for core/edge routers, there are other 'viable' options depending on your requirements. if you need in excess of 2500 BGP sessions on a single chassis, there aren't many viable options besides a Cisco 7600.
I certainly do not mean to be rude, but I feel you're attempting to speak from experience you don't fully have (yet, hopefully!)
Hello, VRRP!
There are open standards for pretty much every Cisco proprietary protocol. Even EIGRP is now available as an informational RFC.
I've been in network engineering for 12+ years and I fundamentally disagree with a lot of what is said about "networking" and interop by many programmer-types (not casting here, but) on HN. Yes, yes, you may understand system DevOps to a point, however I'm not sure you've spent a significant amount of time studying Dijkstra's algorithm or truly have an idea of how to deploy a global IPv6 overlay. I'm also not trying to be snide here but I feel that, often times, many things that come up on HN are just fundamentally designed wrong from PHY all the way up until the devs get a hold of the rest. I've been in a very successful startup (think one of the top online backup services) wherein their network was run on commodity junk hardware. They were asking me how I'd troubleshoot this, that and the other thing - obviously with no debug (this guy said that with a grin). First and foremost, you designed it wrong - I can show you inefficiency in about 10 minutes of performance engineering that I would have designed around without thinking about those things. So, yes, I can waste time tracking down a bad NIC on your network, but if you feel that you've earned geek cred because you fired up Wireshark and parsed through a few simplistic ARP tables - you haven't impressed anyone but yourself. That's when I realized I was working with professional developers, and not network architects.
Your simplistic view of FHRP is trivial at best. Maybe if you were talking about how you'd design fault tolerance into a virtual link, say an LSP, with something like BFD in your design I'd be more impressed than conversations about proprietary redundancy protocols of which most network engineers won't touch for a variety of other reasons than the big "C".
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Similarly very few developers have to solve open CS problems in writing a CRUD application (or I guess more comparably to ops, come up with a novel implementation of a complex algorithm).
This is progress, though.
"<redacted> takes your security very seriously." - right. That's a statement, not information regarding the thought or implementation. There's not even a mention of technology. <sigh>
Back around 2000 this was a big deal. Cisco slacked on gigabit routers, and Juniper didn't have a comprehensive product portfolio, so while SP networks could be all J (but maybe with some switches from Extreme, etc,), enterprise networks were a lot more likely to have juniper and Cisco mixed, if they needed juniper performance in the core. Juniper ended up broadening their portfolio and Cisco improved their high performance offerings a few years later.
You seem to be confusing hardware with software. Juniper's gross margin was 64.25% for the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2012, and in that ballpark for previous quarters back to inception.
Here's an example of a large provider with parallel infrastructure each powered by a different hardware provider(Brocade/Extreme). One failed and one kept working. I seem to recall a more detailed RFO but my Google-fu has failed me this morning.
Running an anti-DDoS/CDN service which handles traffic like Cloudflare does would be vastly more difficult.
It's certainly possible to do, but I think the given ~reasonable engineering resources, the net reliability of a heterogenous J/C version of CloudFlare would be less, and performance worse, than what they have now.
Switch fabric is a lot closer to the "run different models of hard drives" (although, you don't do that WITHIN a RAID group either -- you do it on separate RAIDs and possibly separate chassis), than routing infrastructure (which is like running a 777 with 1 GE engine and 1 RR engine. At best, you can turn it back into a 747 and run 2 GE engines and 2 RR engines.)
Unfortunately, amortized over the lifetime of a computer system, risk is not reduced in this manner. There is no hedging of vendor vs vendor in a technical portfolio; what happens instead, for any tech of significance, is the internal development of an abstract control plane that can communicate with both, and that control plane is then the single source of defects. In the meantime your engineers have to become world-class experts on two platforms rather than one. In practice the divided loyalties will turn one world-class engineer into two half-assed ones.
Domino-effect failures, or global misconfiguration failures like those experienced by Cloudflare are edge cases in my experience and not something you should optimise for. When they happen they tend to be catastrophic, but worse is the insidious decline in quality caused by carrying too much technical debt.
Cloudflare's scenario is not comparable to the installation of a RAID set. They are more comparable to a developer of RAID controllers. The experience curve for such is very, very long.
Not saying they couldn't have done other things to make this situation less catastrophic, but diversity of core technology portfolio isn't a winning ticket.