Contrarian Networking Opinions Debated | Generated by AI
Question: What are some unpopular opinions about switching and routing technologies?
Answer:
Here are some genuinely unpopular (or at least contrarian) opinions in the networking community that regularly trigger heated debates on Reddit, Cisco forums, and vendor conferences:
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Vendor certifications (especially CCIE) are mostly a tax on engineers and don’t correlate with real-world skill anymore.
Many self-taught or vendor-agnostic engineers running large networks (cloud providers, hedge funds, hyperscalers) outperform lifelong CCIEs who’ve never touched anything outside IOS/XE. -
SDN was oversold and largely failed in the enterprise.
Outside of very large cloud providers and a few niche telco use-cases, most “SDN” deployments are just centralized management + traditional distributed control planes with a fancy overlay (ACI, NSX, etc.). True OpenFlow-style SDN is effectively dead. -
EVPN/VXLAN is overcomplicated for 95% of enterprise campuses.
A well-designed Layer-3-to-the-access model with OSPF/BGP and good old 802.1Q trunks is simpler, more deterministic, and cheaper than running EVPN everywhere just because “it’s the future.” -
White-box switching + merchant silicon (Broadcom Tomahawk/Jericho) has won, and traditional vendors are just reselling the same chips with a bloated NOS tax.
Cisco, Arista, and Juniper all run on the same Broadcom/Intel/Marvell silicon. The premium you pay for Catalyst/NCS/QFX is mostly brand and support theater. -
IPv6 adoption is still pathetic after 25+ years because most network engineers secretly don’t want to learn it.
NAT + private addressing “just works” and gives a false sense of security. Most IPv6 deployments are half-hearted “dual-stack” that still rely on IPv4 for everything important. -
TRILL, SPB, and FabricPath were better ideas than VXLAN/EVPN but lost for marketing reasons, not technical ones.
They provided true Layer-2 multipathing without the encapsulation tax and controller dependency, yet the industry went all-in on VXLAN because of cloud hype. -
Multicast is dying and doesn’t deserve the complexity we still throw at it.
Outside of IPTV and finance, almost nobody needs PIM anymore. Application-layer multicast (BitTorrent-style) or anycast + unicast replication is good enough. -
Network automation hasn’t delivered the promised 10x productivity gains because most teams spend more time fighting YAML and Jinja2 than they ever did with CLI.
Poor abstractions and constant schema changes (looking at you, Cisco’s ever-shifting YANG models) make “infrastructure as code” a nightmare. -
Leaf-spine (Clos) topologies are often cargo-culted without understanding the traffic matrix.
Many organizations deploy 3:1 oversubscribed leaf-spine fabrics when a simple two-tier design would have been cheaper and performed better for their east-west-light workloads. -
Hardware routing (ASICs) isn’t magically better than software routing in 2025.
Modern x86/ARM servers with DPDK, VPP, or eBPF/XDP can push 100–400 Gbps of routing per box at lower cost than merchant-silicon switches once you factor in licensing and support.
These opinions tend to be unpopular with traditional enterprise engineers, vendor SEs, and certification junkies—but increasingly accepted in cloud-native, web-scale, and low-level Linux networking circles.
References:
- Reddit r/networking “What’s your networking hill to die on?” threads (multiple years)
- NANOG mailing list archives on SDN/EVPN debates
- Ivan Pepelnjak’s blog posts on EVPN complexity
- DPDK and FD.io performance claims / eBPF/XDP routing benchmarks