6 ms·

"Cloud-based" is the implementation; the killer feature is the single pane of glass. It's just hard to implement that without putting a bunch of logic in the cl

"Cloud-based" is the implementation; the killer feature is the single pane of glass. It's just hard to implement that without putting a bunch of logic in the cloud. Last I worked at Meraki was 2015; I don't remember any artificial limiting of bandwidth at that time.

Silhouette 6y ago
"Cloud-based" is the implementation; the killer feature is the single pane of glass. It's just hard to implement that without putting a bunch of logic in the cloud. Hard in what way? As long as the control traffic has paths between all relevant devices over the management LAN, why does the cloud need to be used at all?
- azernik 6y ago
  1. Putting the management UI on a local system requires some custom networking setup, and is full of security footguns. 2. Most customers who want this have multi-site setups; in that case, you need paths across the public internet too. Again security footguns, and also reliability ones. 3. Remote work is very very common for IT people. 4. Recovery from configuration mess-ups is harder if your control plane has to run on the same network that you've messed up. There are on-site controllers available. They've just lost out in the market because of the amount of in-house IT expertise they require. No one wants to deal with that shit, and outsourcing the security and reliability problems to a specialized third party is usually a good idea.
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    This looks like an enterprise perspective. For smaller organisations operating on a single site, some of these concerns won't apply. I also think you're being a little one-sided there because cloud-hosted configuration has its own risks in terms of security and accidentally cutting off your management access, many of them directly analogous to the ones you mentioned, plus you have all the usual concerns about any critical system that depends on Internet connectivity to work properly. At the end of the day, nothing is more reliable than local wired networking, and nothing is more flexible for disaster recovery than having someone physically on-site. In the prosumer to small business segment, I would argue that there is still enormous potential value in being able to configure all of the network gear from a single GUI, not least because it doesn't then require a lot of in-house networking expertise to get something going that works and is reasonably secure.
    - azernik 6y ago
      > also think you're being a little one-sided there because cloud-hosted configuration has its own risks in terms of security and accidentally cutting off your management access, many of them directly analogous to the ones you mentioned, But with a cloud-managed system you have a professional, single-purpose organization dealing with those challenges. Which you are getting for the rock-bottom price of your licensing/support plan. Building a good internal IT organization is hard and expensive, and most businesses have other things to do. > plus you have all the usual concerns about any critical system that depends on Internet connectivity to work properly. Generally these systems only need internet connectivity to change the configuration and for some monitoring features. In practice, customers are okay with these being unavailable during internet outages as long as both the management platform and the ISP are on a pretty strict SLA. (Compare, for example, the usual downtime from your 1-4-person IT team not having someone with the right skills on call.) > and nothing is more flexible for disaster recovery than having someone physically on-site. Who has the cash for that? > In the prosumer to small business segment, I would argue that there is still enormous potential value in being able to configure all of the network gear from a single GUI, not least because it doesn't then require a lot of in-house networking expertise to get something going that works and is reasonably secure. That was my original point: "Generally, halfway decent wireless APs are all targeted at the enterprise market. Consumer hardware is a brutal race to the bottom, as lay consumers aren't qualified to compare options based on anything but price and UI. Ubiquiti was an outlier in trying to bring enterprise features to the consumer market" I don't know what your standard for a 10-to-50-employee small business is, but "point your browser at this IP address" is usually beyond their in-house technical skills [1]. Small businesses whose core competence is software/networking, or who by coincidence have that expertise in-house, are a tiny niche market. No one [2] cares. [1] See for example the rise of the Managed Service Provider, which was a large and growing subsegment for Meraki back in 2015 or so. Showing up, installing the hardware, setting up the wireless, and then managing it from your office a few miles away is a big business opportunity, and is a much more efficient use of limited skilled IT labor. [2] No one with substantial resources and a profit motive.
      - Silhouette 6y ago
  - kortilla 6y ago
    > 4. Recovery from configuration mess-ups is harder if your control plane has to run on the same network that you've messed up. That’s a senseless statement in the context of a cloud solution that requires Internet to work.
    - azernik 6y ago
      In actual deployments and support situations I saw at Meraki, connectivity from individual hosts to the internet was usually the most reliable part of the network.

Silhouette 6y ago

"Cloud-based" is the implementation; the killer feature is the single pane of glass. It's just hard to implement that without putting a bunch of logic in the cloud. Hard in what way? As long as the control traffic has paths between all relevant devices over the management LAN, why does the cloud need to be used at all?

azernik 6y ago
1. Putting the management UI on a local system requires some custom networking setup, and is full of security footguns. 2. Most customers who want this have multi-site setups; in that case, you need paths across the public internet too. Again security footguns, and also reliability ones. 3. Remote work is very very common for IT people. 4. Recovery from configuration mess-ups is harder if your control plane has to run on the same network that you've messed up. There are on-site controllers available. They've just lost out in the market because of the amount of in-house IT expertise they require. No one wants to deal with that shit, and outsourcing the security and reliability problems to a specialized third party is usually a good idea.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  This looks like an enterprise perspective. For smaller organisations operating on a single site, some of these concerns won't apply. I also think you're being a little one-sided there because cloud-hosted configuration has its own risks in terms of security and accidentally cutting off your management access, many of them directly analogous to the ones you mentioned, plus you have all the usual concerns about any critical system that depends on Internet connectivity to work properly. At the end of the day, nothing is more reliable than local wired networking, and nothing is more flexible for disaster recovery than having someone physically on-site. In the prosumer to small business segment, I would argue that there is still enormous potential value in being able to configure all of the network gear from a single GUI, not least because it doesn't then require a lot of in-house networking expertise to get something going that works and is reasonably secure.
  - azernik 6y ago
    > also think you're being a little one-sided there because cloud-hosted configuration has its own risks in terms of security and accidentally cutting off your management access, many of them directly analogous to the ones you mentioned, But with a cloud-managed system you have a professional, single-purpose organization dealing with those challenges. Which you are getting for the rock-bottom price of your licensing/support plan. Building a good internal IT organization is hard and expensive, and most businesses have other things to do. > plus you have all the usual concerns about any critical system that depends on Internet connectivity to work properly. Generally these systems only need internet connectivity to change the configuration and for some monitoring features. In practice, customers are okay with these being unavailable during internet outages as long as both the management platform and the ISP are on a pretty strict SLA. (Compare, for example, the usual downtime from your 1-4-person IT team not having someone with the right skills on call.) > and nothing is more flexible for disaster recovery than having someone physically on-site. Who has the cash for that? > In the prosumer to small business segment, I would argue that there is still enormous potential value in being able to configure all of the network gear from a single GUI, not least because it doesn't then require a lot of in-house networking expertise to get something going that works and is reasonably secure. That was my original point: "Generally, halfway decent wireless APs are all targeted at the enterprise market. Consumer hardware is a brutal race to the bottom, as lay consumers aren't qualified to compare options based on anything but price and UI. Ubiquiti was an outlier in trying to bring enterprise features to the consumer market" I don't know what your standard for a 10-to-50-employee small business is, but "point your browser at this IP address" is usually beyond their in-house technical skills [1]. Small businesses whose core competence is software/networking, or who by coincidence have that expertise in-house, are a tiny niche market. No one [2] cares. [1] See for example the rise of the Managed Service Provider, which was a large and growing subsegment for Meraki back in 2015 or so. Showing up, installing the hardware, setting up the wireless, and then managing it from your office a few miles away is a big business opportunity, and is a much more efficient use of limited skilled IT labor. [2] No one with substantial resources and a profit motive.
    - Silhouette 6y ago
- kortilla 6y ago
  > 4. Recovery from configuration mess-ups is harder if your control plane has to run on the same network that you've messed up. That’s a senseless statement in the context of a cloud solution that requires Internet to work.
  - azernik 6y ago
    In actual deployments and support situations I saw at Meraki, connectivity from individual hosts to the internet was usually the most reliable part of the network.