On December 9th, 2020, I created a new GitHub repository and pushed the first commit of my “I hate creating Vagrantfiles by hand” tool. It could create Vagrantfile and Ansible inventory from a (very rudimentary) network topology and deploy handcrafted device configurations on Cisco IOS and Arista EOS.

Over 2100 commits from 25 contributors and over 650 issues and 800 pull requests brought us to where netlab is today: a versatile virtual lab deployment tool¹ that supports most networking control-plane protocols (apart from MPLS-TE and IP multicast), popular data plane encapsulations, and over two dozen platforms from a dozen vendors.

Thanks a million to all contributors and everyone who took their time to submit a bug report, asked a question that pushed us in the right direction, or spread the word. netlab development still runs on karma points, and our total marketing budget is zero² (not that I would want to have it any other way), so anything you can do to help us make netlab better or make more networking engineers aware of what it can do is highly appreciated.