Containerlab: A guide to building your own virtual datacenter and monitoring it#

Mathis Bramkamp, Gordon Gidófalvy (Nokia)

• Why: Containerlab has become the de-facto open-source network labbing tool (300K installations, 140+ contributors, 35+ supported NOSes, 13 added in the last 12 months). The workshop goes beyond topology-building to telemetry (gNMIc/Prometheus/Grafana) and a Kubernetes-based orchestration demo — a full lab-to-automation pipeline.
• What: A hands-on workshop covering: (1) containerlab topology creation with recent 2025 additions, (2) traffic generation and observation including Edgeshark for remote packet captures and link impairment simulation, (3) a modern open-source telemetry stack (gNMIc → Prometheus → Grafana streaming dashboards), and (4) a Kubernetes-based network orchestrator managing the same topology. The slides also cover the new (May 2025) Containerlab API Server with RBAC, multitenancy, and CI/CD pipeline integration.
• How: Containerlab topology files (YAML) define nodes (containerized NOSes like SR Linux, cEOS, FRR; VM-based via vrnetlab) and links with automatic interface-name translation. The API server enables lab-as-a-service for CI/CD: deploy from a PR, run tests (config syntax, connectivity, route table), get results, cleanup. Clabernetes distributes topologies across k8s clusters. NRX turns NetBox-documented networks into runnable labs.
• Where applicable: Any network team wanting reproducible, version-controlled lab environments for design validation, automation testing, or training. Nokia-presented but containerlab is fully open-source and multi-vendor. The Kubernetes section requires no prior k8s experience.