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Comment by SEJeff | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact, Arista switches are very lightly modified minimal Fedora installs with some fancy hardware. The entire userspace (literally all of it) is written in well done python and the magic is all in their asics. I got to RE their entire firmware as part of R&D at one of my previous employers.

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Arista uses commodity ASICs which are programmed from specialized binary blobs running in a linux based userspace. This is the same thing linux whitebox switches do.

Sorry I should have better specified. The magic is in the asics that are programmed with their own proprietary magic, but most of the userspace is written in python, and it is relatively well written python.

The majority of the userspace is not in python, but binaries. None of the magic is in the asics (which are commodity Broadcom).

Sorry the majority of the troubleshooting and management bits are all in python. You can even get a bash shell on an Arista if you want. Quite nice hardware.

Don't they run on commodity Broadcom ASICs?

Yes but then again, so do some Cisco switches nowadays. Arista's management team is former Cisco as well. There is a tangled legal history between the two companies, with Cisco claiming various patent infringements. So far as I know, none of the claims are hardware-related.

Previous poster claimed that all of the magic was hardware but I've always been told that it was in the software. HPE now seems to have some agreement with Arista.

Modern network ASICs are highly-programmable devices. So you can implement a lot of magic on the same hardware as competitors.

It's really not one way or the other, but the software and hardware working together that's important.

[disclaimer: I am a former Arista employee. I did some of the "light" Fedora modifications.]

Did I get it wrong? One thing we found interesting is that we could run unmodified software directly on the switches so long as we built it for the AMD Athlons running on them.

Precisely my point. Cumulus, Canonical, Fedora - take your pick.

Ariana impressed me with their automated testing. Prices are very reasonable too.

Everyone has automated testing. What Arista doesn’t have is 20+ years of features (bloat).

I'd like to think they do, but Cisco and Juniper sales guys have been rather cagey on the scale of their testing.

As a customer of both Cisco and juniper for many years, I can surmise based on experience of their software quality that Cisco has terrible automated testing, and Juniper has less terrible but still terrible automated testing.

Both vendors have a lot of legacy code, so this is somewhat expected. Arista started with modern kernels and used modern development practices from the start.

Barracuda firewalls are similar: mostly vanilla Linux with a little magic.

That 'little' magic being specialized hardware packet processors that are programmed from proprietary programs running in Linux.

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