[j-nsp] Juniper vs Arista

[Jared Mauch]

> On Aug 13, 2018, at 9:08 PM, Colton Conor <colton.conor at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> We have used Juniper for a long time across various lines. What I have
> noticed is on the JTAC recommend version website piratically all of their
> product lines are running on different code trains. They all run Junos yes,
> but they all have different features. It seems like Juniper has a different
> software development team for every product.

There tends to be common code (vendors call it their platform independent or similar)
For features like BGP, etc..

Where it goes into the hardware, you have platform dependent code that deals with the specific hardware.

> Arista's sales engineering are claiming that their entire product line runs
> EOS, and there is a single firmware file for all products. Does anyone know
> if that is true, and how that compares to the way Juniper does things?

You tend to see different software types based on the hardware involved (eg: x86 vs non-x86) as this is necessary.  Juniper has shipped more than one CPU type, so there’s different images.  Much of this is semantics, but a lot can be said about having a strong central engineering team at companies that keep things from going too far off the rails.  Cisco has it far worse than Juniper, but Juniper also has way more product lines than it did in the 90s.

Personally I really like Arista but also like JunOS based on my use case.

What are your goals?  This may help answer this question better.

I believe there’s also arista-nsp on here..

- Jared