Hello jokearns1:
First, I thank you for seeking and reading feedback on this thread.
As a systems engineer and C.C.I.E. candidate, I appreciate both the value of the C.M.L. sandbox and the difficult decisions facing your team as a direct result of its success and popularity. I hope you feel the well-deserved admiration of this entire community every day for such a great resource.
I also hope that I have sufficiently pleaded the case, above, for learners' continued access to such a platform, and sufficiently highlighted its potential sales and pre-sales value, especially for smaller Cisco partners.
Throughout my career, Cisco has affirmatively taken steps to recognize, embrace and empower both meritorious candidates and smaller partners. I remember, two decades ago, 1) reading that the C.C.I.E. had no formal prerequisites and 2) my first 90%-off lab-discount order (available to Cisco partners). C.C.N.A. was my first certification, and I recall contrasting it to exams I later took from Citrix, Microsoft, RIM, etc., where, e.g., the right answer would be marked wrong and only the vendor's costly training warned candidates beforehand, exams where all the questions and answers had been leaked and exams devoid of substance but heavy on marketing jargon. As a result I, like many others, favored and continue to favor Cisco certifications heavily.
Cisco's broad, longstanding culture of empowerment and level playing fields now seemingly stands at a fork in the road with the vital goal of open developer access. I respectfully submit that this is a false choice and that Cisco can and should pursue both paths.
C.M.L. requires significant backend resources. For this reason foremost, its value to certification candidates and developers is high, and it also poses serious scalability challenges. I submit that Cisco is best suited to solve and manage the underlying infrastructure challenges, not other vendors, individual candidates and developers or a combination thereof. It is worth noting that many certification candidates have only their personal hardware on which to run a local instance of platforms like C.M.L. See, e.g., Bombal, Homeless security guard to CCIE: You can't train ambition: Katherine McNamara shares her story, Cisco Live, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCRjDwuuQOA (last accessed Oct. 1, 2024).
That said, backend resources cost money. To the extent that Cisco can afford to provide open, free-as-in-beer access, I implore your team to continue to do so. I worry that the current demand on the sandbox is somewhat overstated. Even now, the system is sometimes below session capacity. The maximum wait I experienced to start a session before the changes announced in this thread was a little over an hour. I worry that the five-day session limit allows many sessions to sit idle for significant periods when they should have ended or been suspended, were suspending a session possible while also enforcing a five-day total cap (e.g., a user starts a session Monday morning, but then sits idle, causing automatic suspension of the session from Monday evening to Tuesday afternoon, at which point user interaction is required to resume the session, while still force-terminating it on Friday).
Of course, in the long term, Cisco is likely unable to meet the increasing demand for the C.M.L. sandbox for free. Its current popularity, however, is a solid viability indicator for reasonable, fixed-price market offerings to candidates and developers. Though incomplete and loaded with caveats, such offerings have long been on the roadmap. See, e.g., Schmieder, How to run Cisco Modeling Labs in the Cloud ("We have heard requests to have CML Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and we’re working hard to make this a reality in the future.") (Sept. 1, 2023) (emphasis in original), available at https://blogs.cisco.com/learning/how-to-run-cisco-modeling-labs-in-the-cloud?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwyL24BhCtARIsALo0fSDjRxeTUA_kLwTww2qiOozGdRXN7UxfQlyAi4H4VcPneDzjqI4DSq8aAgUpEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds (last accessed Oct. 16, 2024).
As it stands, a single-vendor hosted offering remains conspicuously absent from the current C.M.L. product. See Cisco Modeling Labs—Personal, The Cisco Learning Network Store ("Cisco Modeling Labs—Personal is distributed as an OVA file for you to deploy as a virtual machine on supported VMware products or as an .ISO file for bare metal installation."), available at https://learningnetworkstore.cisco.com/cisco-modeling-labs-personal/cisco-modeling-labs-personal/CML-PERSONAL.html (last accessed Oct. 16, 2024).
If your team has not already offered to the relevant other Cisco team(s) to use the current C.M.L. sandbox as a blueprint for a fixed-price C.M.L. hosted solution, then I urge you to do so. Your team has already solved the hard challenges. Technically speaking, horizontally scaling the grid and checking subscription statuses as a requisite for entry seem minor additions to what you have built.
Last, I urge Cisco to continue to value the flatness of the playing fields it has thus far maintained. I hope that Cisco will consider the long-term value of tapping a broad, global talent pool for certified personnel when it considers profit and loss for a hosted C.M.L. offering. I also urge creative thinking as to its pricing models, e.g., account for the prevailing local wages in customers' areas, provide discounted access to those with competitors' certifications, those who have booked Cisco exams and those eligible to advance through higher-level Cisco exams and consider a scholarship program and discounts for partners, traditional high school, vocational school, college and community college students and those adversely impacted through no faults of their own by economic conditions, prejudice and injustice.
I sincerely thank you for your consideration,
by /s/ Martin MartyG Gottesfeld,
Rolling Stone-featured human-rights advocate,
Former HufffPost contributor,
Former Reporter, The Intercept and
Cisco Certified Specialist—Enterprise Core, Cisco Certified Network Associate (2003, expired).
