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Amazon Web Services Isn't Making a 'Commercial' Networking Switch, Cisco Says (geekwire.com)
A week after a report claimed that Amazon Web Services was building its own bare-bones networking switch in a potential threat to networking giant companies, Cisco says it has checked with Amazon, with which it has long maintained a relationship, and it has been assured by the ecommerce giant that is not entering its territory. From a report: AWS CEO Andy Jassy and Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins had a "recent call" from which Robbins walked away satisfied that AWS wasn't "actively building a commercial network switch," Marketwatch reported Wednesday, citing a statement from Cisco that it confirmed as authentic with AWS. That follows a report last week from The Information that AWS was working on a so-called "white-box switch," which the site portrayed as a frontal assault on Cisco that sent networking stocks slumping on a lazy summer Friday afternoon.
You have to make the dog food, then eat your own dog food. And then, it becomes commercial dog food. This is the way of AWS already. Right now, they're just making this for themselves - any future application is pure coincidence.
"We reminded Amazon of the contract language that prohibits them from selling competitive hardware devices or face immediate loss of support and revocation of all software licenses."
Surely free market and competition and all that jazz. Not like Amazon don't cheat to fuck though but that's besides the point.
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Networking gear isn't as flexible as Software or consumer items.
Companies have spent a lot of money just on metal bars with holes drilled/punched with a particular size and spaced to fit most of the vendors equipment. Which supports standards that nearly all the other vendors support.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
But to make use of said Cisco gear, with updated software, you need a support contract. You know, that thing where your business relations person talks to their sales rep and irons out a deal where you give them a barrel of money in exchange for access to some website.
This is why Cisco equipment is difficult to support outside of an official corporate IT environment. So when I was doing my last round of network upgrades, I went with someone else... Not because I couldn't afford Cisco gear, but because I didn't have the bureaucracy to get software updates for it.
The story the other day was the Amazon was making cheap switches. Plenty of companies make cheap switches. Several make decent switches. That's not Cisco's market. Cisco sells IOS, and now IOS XR. A panel of ethernet jacks is a commodity that doesn't compete with what Cisco does.
Data centers such as AWS, and Azure do not really on premium Cisco switches. They tend to deploy a cheap, bare-bones switch without all the fancy features. They then rely on their own software to do the heavy lifting. That is what SDN (Software Defined Networking) is all about.
Interesting.
(starts shorting Cisco)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
When we said "We aren't planning to not make commercial routers in competition with Cisco" what we meant to say was "We are planning to not make routers i competition with Cisco. Our bad. So sorry!" :D
CIsco sells the brand. There may be niche markets where cisco gear is needed, but in the majority of situations, any of a number of vendors would operate just as well. Cisco gets by on inertia... a combination of slightly non-standard features that unwitting users have started using and are locked into, and the general cowardice of network managers to make the leap to buying something other than what their predecessor bought.
Don't get me wrong, Cisco's gear is top notch (though "top notch" these days really is putting too shiny a finish on it... let's go with "least suck") but it is by no means head and shoulders above the competition, and rather expensive unless it's you only option (i.e. you're doing something weird with TDM/IP)
Someone had to do it.
FWIW, when you buy network gear it usually comes in with software that two release chains and at least a year out of date.
Someone had to do it.
> . Cisco gets by on inertia... a combination of slightly non-standard features that unwitting users have started using
Quite often, the non-standard features Cisco offers become standardized 5-10 years later. They are simply ahead of the standards. Things like channel bonding and cost-based routing are now considered "must-have". They were unique to Cisco for years, before eventually the rest of the industry agreed on a standard.
Certainly not everyone NEEDS Cisco. Frequently though, it's far better to make a needed improvement by turning on a feature you didn't need before, rather than having to replace hardware or come up with weird hacks because your cheap gear doesn't do the things that Cisco does. It very much depends on the relative cost of:
Network down time
Network administration (administrators aren't cheap)
Hardware
$500 more or even $5000 spent on hardware can be a GREAT value when it saves two hours of down time, or not. It depends - how much does two hours of down time cost your company?
Amazon started selling books, now they are one of the top players in e-commerce. They may be designing a switch for their own services for now, but give it time, someone will figure out they can be sold too.
Yeah, there are a lot of things to consider. For my own SOHO use, used enterprise Cisco gear works pretty well. Just yesterday I needed to set up routed secure tunnels between my home office network and two other locations. That was easy to do with Cisco gear I got for almost free. Of course I'm a nerd, Cisco integrated services routers aren't for everyone.
Instead of constantly logging in to my employer's VPN with all three operating systems I use, a thought occurred to me - my employer's end of the VPN is a Cisco ASA firewall. I have a Cisco ASA firewall in my home rack. Why not just let my ASA VPN to their ASA and I don't have to manually connect all the time.
I clicked your signature link and saw you get Linux running on a printer - eight years ago. That's cool. Why? I wonder if a couple of cool uses occurred to you.
My immediate thought is that printer can move things in two dimensions with 600DPI accuracy. Replace the printer head with a Dremel and you've got a high-accuracy CAD-CAM mill from a garage sale printer. Eight years ago you know what was going on with 3D printers. Replace the ink print head with a filament nozzle, boot Linux on the printer, and you're most of the way to a great 3D printer. Now we have good ooen 3D printer designs and resources for parts, but eight years ago your project could have been the start of something really cool.
The story the other day was the Amazon was making cheap switches. Plenty of companies make cheap switches. Several make decent switches. That's not Cisco's market. Cisco sells IOS, and now IOS XR. A panel of ethernet jacks is a commodity that doesn't compete with what Cisco does.
Well, yes and no. What Amazon are likely doing are building their own switches for Software Defined Networking. It is a potentially disruptive technology, because it means cheap switches will do the work of expensive ones. For now it makes sense mostly for the big cloud vendors because the software is immature, and needs careful design. AWS is about building reliable systems out of cheap commodity components by getting the software right, so it's a natural fit.
Whilst Cisco doesn't have anything to worry about yet, the networking world is where the Unix world was 30 years ago: everyone has their own almost-compatible OS, with their own quirks, and some have better premium features than others. It's overdue a shake-up.
I clicked your signature link and saw you get Linux running on a printer - eight years ago. That's cool. Why?
I had some pent up regrets about not using any of the digital systems control stuff I learned in college... never did get far enough to do anything useful with it since I was amply distracted poking at the thousands of mystery registers.
Basically the way I saw it a printer is a prewired little robot... there's a lot more on there than just steppers and switches, more than you'd think. It's got light level sensors, environmental pressure/temp sensors and a lot of other goodies. So I got it as far as I did and fished around for anyone else interested in participating, but everyone seemed to enjoy soldering too much to care.
It was at least something that a security researcher documenting how easy it was to embed malware on printers could point to as an example... the models I was using were not ethernet/wifi connected, but the fact you could overwrite the flash by parport or though their CF card slot could show the
"problem" predating those models.
Someone had to do it.