Open Souce Network Operating Systems

Wed Jan 17 23:48:47 UTC 2018

On Wed 2018-Jan-17 23:11:14 +0000, Matthew Smee <matthew.smee at 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 at slabnet.com
pgp key: B178313E   | also on Signal
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