I feel like things have gotten a lot simpler over time. Examples:
1. There's only one relevant type of optics (Q)SFP(+)(28) instead of many incompatible ones. Line cards have become uncommon.
2. Everything runs Linux so he can just run tcpdump instead of some vendor specific monitor command.
3. 10G ethernet and 56G infiniband are dirt cheap so now there’s a large online community for homelabs that use data center hardware. Nobody needs to be a network guy to run a data center.
>running enterprsie/dc hardware in a homelab is vastly different from running it in production.
This applies to all of software. Enterprise and "home" diverged quite a lot. Back in the 2000s running a webserver at home was roughly similar to doing it for a company. Nowadays they are nothing alike with all the load balancing, caching etc. etc.
1. There's only one relevant type of optics (Q)SFP(+)(28) instead of many incompatible ones. Line cards have become uncommon.
2. Everything runs Linux so he can just run tcpdump instead of some vendor specific monitor command.
3. 10G ethernet and 56G infiniband are dirt cheap so now there’s a large online community for homelabs that use data center hardware. Nobody needs to be a network guy to run a data center.