> But that limits what you can do considerably, to the point that an off-the-rack Juniper or CSCO or whatever probably has more features than you can do here without writing your own code to hook into the mellanox sdk?

I mean, I'm not touching any mellanox sdk here, I am using the a very similar stack that someone on a "software router" would use, on a switch that can automatically accelerate it to 800G+ throughputs, while hitting a 60W power target.

You can hit some of those performance/power numbers in vendor hardware like Juniper/Cisco/Arista, however you have to also put up with their software, I (and others in my group of peers) have not had great experiences with vendor software, and in this setup I am able to patch/fix the software on my own terms.

If there is a security vuln in one section, I can fix that, and call it a day, I won't be forced to upgrade parts of the system I do not want to. I cannot do this with Juniper/Cisco/Arista always.