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Course Overview

Welcome to Bare Metal Networking for Private Clouds! In this course, you'll learn to design and deploy a modern data center network from the ground up.

The course is structured into three main sections that cover networking, infrastructure, and software:

  • Section 1: Scalable Data Center (Pure L3 Networking): Build a Layer 3 spine-leaf underlay using IPv6 link-local addressing, unnumbered BGP sessions, ECMP routing, and sub-50ms failover with BFD.
  • Section 2: Cloud-Native Router (Talos + Cilium): Automate Kubernetes cluster provisioning with Talos Linux and integrate Cilium to align pod networking with the L3 fabric.
  • Section 3: Networking with eBPF: Write eBPF programs to create Cloud-Native Network Functions (CNFs) and chain them into service pipelines with netkit, achieving NIC-level performance.

Throughout the course, each concept module is paired with hands-on labs. You'll get to practice configuring routers, bootstrapping clusters, writing eBPF code, and troubleshooting in realistic scenarios. By the end, you'll have end-to-end control over packet flow, with confidence in each component's performance and reliability.

Let's get started with Section 1, where we tackle building a scalable IPv6 underlay network!