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Arista is largely known for its operating system, best known as EOS. Arista has been known to deploy new features at a more rapid pace than other vendors and to have a more open OS–since EOS was the first production-grade network network operating system to expose any form of Linux to end users.
Because of this, I believe it’s perceived Arista has a better programmability strategy than other vendors. From what I can tell, it is not the case. However, given a few features Arista has in EOS, it makes programming EOS a bit easier than other platforms. Let’s take a look.
At Network Field Day 16, Arista reviewed their programmability strategy. There were 5 core components reviewed:
- EAPI
- OpenConfig
- NetDB Streaming
- Turbines
- EosSdk

Before diving into each of these, I’ll first point out that when I look at “OS programmability,” what is important [to me] is device-level programmability (not controllers or streaming capabilities–those are important topics, but should be covered on their own). Programmability is the ability to program change on a device, isn’t it? Now let’s look at the 5 components in Arista’s strategy.
EAPI - it’s a great API for learning to program an EOS switch. This Continue reading