Workflow

The general workflow takes you through three distinct stages: design, build, and deploy.

1. In the design stage, you specify the physical requirements for your fabric such as the types and roles of the fabric devices (for example, spines, leafs, superspines, external routers, servers, etc.), the speeds and feeds of the fabric devices, how the devices are organized in racks, and how the racks are connected together. The output of this stage is one or more templates that you can use as building blocks for your data center. Each template represents a standalone part of the fabric infrastructure. It can represent a row of racks, a pod, or any other construct including an entire data center.

   The design stage is device-agnostic and site-agnostic. A typical use case is for you to create a template that represents a unique row or pod in your data center. You then take this single template to create blueprints for all similar rows or pods in all your data center sites.

2. The build stage consists of two main tasks: realizing your physical design and creating your overlay networks.

   • You realize your physical design by assigning site-specific resource pools and devices to your template.

   • You create your overlay networks by creating your security zones and then adding virtual networks (subnets) to those security zones. A security zone translates to a VRF on the QFX Series switch.

   The output of this stage is a blueprint that captures your intent for the underlay and overlay networks for a specific site.

3. In the deploy stage, Apstra translates your blueprint into configuration commands that the devices understand and pushes those commands to the devices in your fabric. Apstra then verifies the deployment against the blueprint to detect cabling errors and misbehaving devices. In effect, the blueprint acts as a reference design that Apstra uses to constantly measure the behavior and performance of the actual network against. Any deviations from the reference design are raised as anomalies.