For independent learners, I would say CML - it requires some investment, but it gets you legal access to Cisco images, and it's easy to set up, manage, and use. For folks with a Cisco support contract, the utility of EVE-NG and CML are roughly equal (but IMO, CML has better programmability features)

My understanding is that the free version comes with a handful of basic images (e.g. IOSv, ASAv, etc.), which I don’t believe have licensing constraints that would impede learning.

If you haven’t already seen this starter pack.

go.bsky.app/PxMTChn

For *most* network automation use cases, API.

There's a tiny bit of nuance here, though. If my use case is to analyze and report about device functionality to non-programmer network engineers, CLI/screen scraping may be the right choice.

Customers essentially outsource their testing operations to our team, so it's important to have solid answers to "What can your team do that we can't do internally?" Being able to say "Your environment has 300K+ unique 5-tuple flows - we can emulate that" is one great answer (among others 😁)

That increased scale does cost a pretty penny (easily $100K for just a chassis and a line card or two), but it's great marketing when talking to a customer.

A difference we've noticed between server/DPDK-based traffic generators (TRex, Ixia-C, etc.) and dedicated traffic generator appliances is scale. A good example is how Ixia-C advertises up to 256 streams per port, while Spirent's FX2-10G-S16 line card can handle 64 *thousand* streams per port

For the most part within Cisco, we use either Ixia or Spirent (our team specifically uses Spirent). We have used TRex in the past for some projects (which, from my brief research, looks comparable to Ixia-C) and it worked well enough.

In any case, I'm excited to be here and I'm looking forward to contributing to the Bluesky community!

I am a proud Pluralsight author, with six courses on topics ranging from Ansible, Linux and (recently) Wireshark, as well as four Ansible-centric labs. I also occasionally write technical articles on my blog and have a few side projects (some public, some private) floating around GitHub.

A lot of my daily work is focused on scoping new projects, configuring testbeds, developing test plans that align with customer requirements, and writing internal tools that help us deliver projects faster and with higher quality.

Today, I help lead a team focusing on network/solution testing for Cisco's US Public Sector theater. Simply put, we build testbeds replicating a customer's network, then write automation to test that network!

Previously, I was a TAC engineer working on Cisco's Nexus switches (NX-OS, not ACI - although I do know some fancy ACI words, like "bridge domain" and "L3Out", so I can talk very pseudointellectually about ACI if I have to! 😅)