Apstra

Apstra abstracts a lot – but those who truly understand DC fabrics look under the hood. This post dissects the underlay design of a Juniper 3-stage Clos fabric: from IP addressing to eBGP with individual spine ASNs and the BGP policies that prevent routing loops.

Running Apstra as a managed DC controller directly inside a Containerlab topology is possible – but getting there requires a custom vrnetlab build and a few tricks. This post walks through the whole process, ending with a fully Apstra-managed EVPN/VXLAN fabric running across four Arista cEOS nodes on a Windows laptop.