On Juniper
I've been sitting with this for a short bit.... but I think it's time for some comments on the Juniper acquisition by HP
Re-route
It's a rather eerie coincidence that I sat down to write this post a year to the date of my post about waffling about CCIE / JNCIE . The waffling continued; However, I had done some reflection.
That reflection concluded that I've met/heard of so many Paper CCIE's but I've never met - nor heard of - a Paper JNCIE. In fact, all of the people I've met in my career, that have a JNCIE, have been excellent, if not superb. Looking at you Yufeng, Randy, Dakota, etc.
That made me think about pursuing the JNCIE this year. Especially given that it's practically free:
I think Juniper will keep this program going for the duration it would take me to hit JNCIE; However, I'm concerned about the value of Juniper branding, considering what's happened with other products swallowed by HP.
Just happy I didn't list it in my goals.
The Platform
Along with many of my colleagues, I have a lot of love for Juniper & JunOS.
- It feels like a platform made for operators that live in the terminal and actually solve problems.
- It has dedicated commands for verbose, terse & detailed outputs. Pattern matching & configuration layout has a great hierarchy
- It supports commit-based configuration on all platforms
- The information output is well structured, as it litters onto your screen.
- The feature support is often top-notch (automation, slicing, protocols, etc).
- The documentation has been relatively great
- Unshy about the FreeBSD underpinnings (or Linux with Junos Evolved).
In the argument of Pets vs Cattle, it's a treasured pet.
Fond Memories
I first truly worked with Juniper back in September of 2015, when I started working for a DC / MSP company. One side of our core was Juniper (EX & MX platform) along with a new offering featuring SRX boxes.
That exposure only increased as I migrated to working for an ISP. I have such fond memories on creating documentation for VLAN-Aware VPWS's (E-LINE) for a migration to QFX switches.
I also have fond memories tracing an obscure VRF across the country across several MX's and coming up with a strategy to absorb it into our Multi-tenant Private cloud solution, with overly complex stitching & route-policies.
Then there was that time I had 3-5 SRX's, two EX4200's in my employee co-location & this M20 sucking all that free electricity in my old apartment:
In general, I simply had a great time with Juniper; My love of Juniper is what made me favour the shells of VyOS & IOS-XR.
Looking Forward
I may still try to rush out the JNCIE. I think it could push me to do a lot of the studying I've been holding back on in the past few years; However, I don't think I'd consider it a ticket to the next stage in my career - I think that title is reserved for becoming a better coder / NetDev.
I also acknowledge that HP swallowing Juniper will be a slow process. Their ISP side still fills a gap that HP currently can't.
In the mean time, there's lots of discussion out there. Here's one I quite enjoyed from my RSS feeds: