Network appliance architecture

Networking is a fascinating topic. There are thousands of books and RFC describing protocols from layer 1 to layer 7. In every big network we find variety of network devices that handle traffic and provide additional enhanced services. Example of such devices can be switches, routers, load balancers, traffic accelerators, firewalls, IDS, DDOS mitigation devices and others. Services could be QoS, security and traffic deduplication etc.

Looking at the network devices someone could ask one interesting questions: how to build a network device; how would you describe an internal device architecture?

Of course every company has its own patents, secrets, methods etc. how they built, manage and operate network appliances. Below are some information I found when working with them or reading about them.

• Arista network operating system switch architecture
• Dell DNOS or FTOS architecture
• F5 Network has its Linux based TMOS architecture (link1/link2)