Is a very high end switch a viable replacement to a low end (feature wise) router?

Hi All,

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So - I have equipment in a DC and we offer various services to clients - The primary services are VDI/Hosted infrastructure and to a much lower extent, we offer colo.

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This started as a side business ~7 years ago when I worked at an ISP (with a huge budget and proper core routers) and figured out "why am I not doing this myself" and grew rapidly, and, I'm struggling on the next steps.

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At our core is an Ubiquiti Edgerouter Pro - and it has served us VERY well, but, with some specialist ISPs giving 1Gb/s links, we have had one occasion where we reached capacity and it has given us a few problems as you can imagine. We currently upgraded that link to 10Gb/s (but, using at 1Gb/s until we can find new equipment).

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I know I can upgrade to a Ubiquiti Edgerouter Infinity, however, that can't LAG/aggregate, so, I feel like I'm just delaying the capacity problem. I really want to invest in more carrier grade equipment - what I don't like however is that whilst I am more than willing to spend a lot/have what I thought was a reasonable budget, the jump to anything above 10Gb isn't a little jump... it's mortgage worthy expensive!

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It was always the plan to get multiple upstream providers - however, we are in the main hub of our current provider and we have had ~20 seconds of downtime in 7 years... They have also just offered us a second feed from a redundant router.

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I have been doing a bit of research lately, and I have read some posts (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/bpag4v/whos_using_cumulus_on_an_onie_or_whitebox_switch/ ) that have actually made me question pretty much everything.

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After reviewing our setup, we currently don't use BGP (other than for some of our clients that announce to us), and we have relatively simple firewall policies that I believe could be replicated with switch filter polices. We have numerous VLANs and various bandwidth policies - but again, nothing that a high end switch can't do.

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I am hoping to get a second 10Gb/s feed (for redundancy, not LAG/capacity) shortly, and, we are just going through RIR registration to get our own ASN. The dream is to also get peering at an IX, however, whilst preferred this is not essential.

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The cost of a ~40Gb+ Router is a minimum of ~40x the price of a 40Gb switch (with a few 100Gb ports) and I can't help but think I'm over thinking things.

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I just wondered if I am being silly to think about dumping a router in favour of a very high end switch and/or has anyone done this? Am I asking for trouble, or, could this work?