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. This workshop covers building EVPN-VXLAN topologies plus a full telemetry stack (gNMIc, Prometheus, Grafana) and a Kubernetes-based orchestration demo — relevant to the PM's cloud-native networking and testing interests.
• What: A hands-on workshop teaching containerlab topology creation, adding client traffic, setting up modern telemetry (gNMIc → Prometheus → Grafana streaming dashboard), and using Edgeshark for remote packet captures. Concludes with a Kubernetes-based network orchestrator managing the same topology. The slides cover containerlab's evolution: 300K installations, 140+ contributors, 35+ supported NOSes, 13 new NOSes in the last 12 months.
• How: Containerlab topology files (YAML) define nodes (containerized NOSes like cEOS, SR Linux, FRR; or VM-based via vrnetlab) and links. The API server (released May 2025) enables CI/CD pipeline integration for automated testing (deploy → validate → cleanup). Clabernetes distributes topologies across k8s clusters. NRX turns NetBox-documented networks into runnable containerlab labs.
• Where applicable: Any network team wanting reproducible, version-controlled lab environments. The Kubernetes orchestration section requires no prior k8s experience. Nokia-presented but containerlab is fully open-source and multi-vendor.