On Fri, 24 Oct 2025 at 09:38, Mark Tinka via cisco-nsp <[email protected]> wrote:
> Unfortunately, Cisco are not alone. Juniper are also quickly going down > this path, especially with their newer MX line. > > I have sensed a linear relationship between this strategy and the > growing silence on c-nsp and j-nsp. > > Operators are losing interest. In principle I am not against licensing. I do sympathise to a degree with vendor's struggling with the business case of providing routers for SP customers. In an ideal world license would help to put cost where demand is, as we constantly do see quite stupid features arriving that some customer with big RFP pushed, which adds fragility, complexity and cost to everyone. But of course in the world we actually live in, licenses are motivated by need to increase revenue, not to distribute it where the use is. Investors love to hear the YRC/MRC story, instead of one off purchase story, and it already feels like we are leasing routers not buying, considering support costs more than the devices over the lifetime. And many of us only pay the support, because software is bad, creating perverse incentive for software quality. Having gotten that rant out of the way. The situation isn't too dire, both Cisco and Juniper allow you to use licenses in such a way that the device doesn't degrade customer services while in service, despite licenses. And I would encourage everyone to reject the notion where license issues cause customer observable issues. I am fine with the process where we /must/ configure call-come, and this call-home should support HTTP (not S) proxy. Where HTTPS proxy then calls the vendor. The data sent should be human readable, like JSON, YAML with no mystery strings or byte arrays so we can confirm no sensitive data is extracted. And upon license expiration or call-home not working, your account team would make it a business problem, not a technical problem of service users. I know that smart licenses can be set up in such a way that license expiration causes outages, but I've always rejected that solution from Cisco and they do provide alternatives. We've tried to get HTTPS certificates working for +20years and still for most of BCP appears to be 'wait until they expire and you have an outage, then panic and swear it'll be handled properly from now on'. Idea that we wouldn't have process problems renewing licenses constantly is naive. -- ++ytti _______________________________________________ cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/
