Oluwatosin Oladayo Aramide

EVPN multihoming vs MLAG: what actually breaks Both make two leaf switches look like one LACP partner to a dual-homed server. Both forward on both links. So which one holds up when something fails? Two labs on Cumulus Linux, identical wiring, four failure scenarios, every probe accounted for.

Your pod is Running, your Service exists, the curl still hangs. Most Kubernetes traffic diagrams stop at a Load Balancer cloud. On bare metal that cloud is a Cisco Nexus EVPN fabric. Here is one HTTPS request traced all the way to the pod, with the command that proves every hop.

A MAC address leaves a Cisco datacenter and reappears behind a Juniper leaf in another one. Watch RFC 7432 do its job across the multisite DCI: the counter climbing 0, 1, 2, the losing leaf yielding, and the exact BGP packets that carried each move, captured on the interconnect.

Type-2 gets all the attention, but a datacenter fabric runs on five core EVPN route types and quietly depends on every one. Here is what each actually carries, decoded from a live multihomed fabric, including the two types MLAG labs never get to show you.

One git clone, four commands, and 20 minutes later a client curls an anycast VIP by DNS name through two firewalls into whichever datacenter the control plane picked. 39 nodes, zero manual configuration. Here is how the whole lab became a git repo.

Part 7 of the Agentic NOC series. How you earn the right to trust a system that watches and sometimes changes your network: 131 offline tests against real captured output, mutated-data fault detection, a live 30-fault campaign, and the worst bug of all, a monitor that mistakes silence for success.

Part 6 of the Agentic NOC series. Real captured runs: a request crossing both protocol layers to a live switch, the planner fanning out, a 30-fault detect-remediate-verify loop, the monitor self-healing then escalating on a flap and refusing to fake health.

A traceroute between two datacenters comes back as six lines. Each one is a precise statement about what a multisite EVPN-VXLAN fabric does to a packet: the anycast gateway, the VXLAN wrap and unwrap, numbered versus unnumbered routers, the crossing between sites. All six, decoded on the boxes.

Part 5 of the Agentic NOC series. Three read-only MCP servers over a live fabric, firewall pair, and cluster; three A2A specialists and a supervisor; a local-first planner; one guarded write path; an autonomous monitor. The one design law, and how to rebuild it.