Cisco IOS Is Still King
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Cisco IOS is the cornerstone of our network infrastructure. As a network engineer for my organization, there isn't a single day (or maybe even a couple of hours) that I'm not interacting with Cisco IOS in some capacity. My team and I use it to troubleshoot network issues, make network changes, fulfill user requests, plan network infrastructure changes, monitor device environmentals, apply configuration macros, check for system resource utilization (e.g. CPU, memory), and so much more.
Pros
- Cisco IOS image upgrades usually go very smooth due to thorough quality assurance software testing from Cisco. It also helps that Cisco has very helpful white papers that helps walk you through the upgrade process in easy to follow steps.
- Does a great job of providing network device health data via the various Cisco IOS commands
- It's a fast operating system which makes it a dream to work with
Cons
- By this point, there are several "flavors" of the Cisco IOS such as XE, XR, and the standard Cisco IOS. While they are all fairly similar, there does exist syntax differences between them. It would be ideal if at some point in the future, Cisco is able to unify all of them into one standard operating system which would use the same syntax across all platforms.
- While overall Cisco does a great job of QA'ing their IOS, no matter the release, there's always some minor bugs. I think it's important that Cisco continue to pour resources into their QA team to test their software.
- While I'm very familiar with the graphical readouts of "show processes cpu history" I would love for Cisco to eventually find a more intuitive way to display this data. I can't begin to count how many times I've had to teach more entry level (and even mid level) engineers how this graph is interpreted.
- I do wish that Cisco had something similar to Juniper's "commit check" or "commit confirmed". This helps validate the changes you're about to apply, and catch errors, so that you have a better idea of the impact of the change.
Likelihood to Recommend
I've worked with several network device vendors in my 10+ years of being in the industry and my favorite continues to be Cisco IOS. Overall, Cisco IOS tends to be the most stable, the most intuitive, has the best TAC support, and has the best knowledge base articles and white papers.
