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SONiC
Landing page for Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) - https://sonic-net.github.io/SONiC/ (by sonic-net)
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InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
If you aren’t going for a Cisco-specific certification I would forget about getting exclusively Cisco gear and look for any open/‘gray box’ hardware that run newer open network OSes like SONiC [0], or Pica8 [1]. The skills are transferable and second-hand hardware from a variety of manufacturers like Edge-Core, QCT, or Dell or others is available for super cheap on eBay.
The advantage here is having a wide variety of experience outside of Cisco lock-in with open software (normally Linux based, some are based on *BSDs) and the actual software license is free and open for the most part. You also will get a full linux distro with a familiar cli so you can run automation and config management code directly on the switch, which would help you learn multiple things at once. Also it doesn’t hurt that you’d get 10 gigabit, or even 100g(!), Ethernet for your homelab for super cheap :).
For your shopping, look at the SONiC hardware compatibility list [2], often you can find lots of these for cheap.
[0] https://github.com/sonic-net/SONiC