Syllabus 1 — Expert practitioner

Updated

July 30, 2026

Syllabus 1 — Expert practitioner (spiral)

Vendor-agnostic. Open lab images only. Destination: expert NetOps competence.

Thesis

Experts debug planes, encapsulation, and state—not brand menus. Spiral depth beats feature bingo.

Arcs

  1. Models (planes, encaps, underlay/overlay) + verification culture
  2. Lab craft (Containerlab + Linux networking)
  3. Packets & tables (MAC, ARP/ND, RIB vs forwarding)
  4. Bridging domains until boring
  5. Interior routing truth (adjacency, flood/SPF, multi-area)
  6. Edge routing & policy (sessions, path choice, dual-homing)
  7. Resilience & services (FHRP-class, NAT, relays)
  8. Filters, QoS vocabulary, hardening
  9. Overlays & fabrics
  10. NetOps (automation, CI labs, observe, runbooks)

Definition of done

Broken multi-protocol lab → restore with evidence → prevent recurrence → all in free Containerlab images.