Courses¶
Nine phases, from routing foundations to running a network in production. Each is standalone, but they're ordered so every one builds on the last.
Nothing is marked finished until it has actually been run. See the roadmap for how each phase is progressing.
Start here¶
-
Foundations · Linux prerequisite
Shell scripting, parsing device output, SSH keys and jump hosts, systemd and logs, and git for config management. The Linux a network engineer actually uses.
Foundations¶
-
Phase 0 · IGP Fundamentals reading track
Link-state routing, OSPF, IS-IS, dual-stack IPv6. The underlay every later phase assumes. No lab — read it and move on.
-
Phase 1 · BGP Fundamentals & Policies 4 labs validated
eBGP and iBGP, route reflectors, path selection, and the policy tooling that decides which route actually wins.
-
Phase 2 · BGP-DIA & Internet Edge 4 labs validated
Multi-homing to providers, RPKI, peering, and NAT / CGNAT at the edge.
Service provider¶
-
Phase 3 · MPLS & L3VPN 4 labs validated
Moving traffic by swapping labels. LDP, RSVP-TE, and L3VPN options A, B and C.
-
Phase 3.5 · Segment Routing 3 labs validated
SR-MPLS, SR-PCE, Ti-LFA and the basics of SRv6. How hyper-scalers (FAANG) steer traffic without building state in the core, and how SDN controllers integrate with IGPs.
Data centre¶
-
Phase 4 · EVPN Services 4 labs validated
VXLAN-EVPN fabrics, EVPN-ELAN and EVPN-VPWS, and stretching EVPN between sites with DCI.
Operations¶
-
Phase 5 · NetDevOps (Network Automation) planned
NetBox (Source of Truth), Python (Nornir/Netmiko), and Ansible. Treating infrastructure as code with CI/CD pipelines to validate ECMP paths and deploy fabrics programmatically.
-
Phase 6 · Hybrid Cloud & Edge planned
AWS Transit Gateway, BGP over DirectConnect, IPsec and SD-WAN.
-
Phase 7 · Telemetry & Observability planned
Replacing legacy SNMP with gNMI and OpenConfig streaming telemetry. Building a modern SRE monitoring stack with Prometheus, Grafana, and TRex traffic generation.
Not sure where to start?
New to routing — Phase 0, then 1 and 2. Data-centre focus — Phase 1, then jump straight to Phase 4, which is live today. Service provider — Phase 1, then 3 and 3.5. Already know the protocols — Phases 5 and 7 are where most of the actual job is.
Also available: the Juniper VXLAN-EVPN archive — a complete written course kept as reading material.