🥾 Walk: Deploying Containerlab in Kubernetes with Arista cEOS

🐣 If you missed the Crawl phase, start here.

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🧭 What We’re Doing in the Walk Phase

In this post, I’m using clabverter to deploy a Containerlab topology directly inside Kubernetes — specifically using Arista cEOS. We’ll walk through converting the topology, deploying it, and validating that everything’s working — ending with a live, CLI-accessible network device.

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⚙️ Step 1: Define the Containerlab Topology

Here’s the ceos.lab.yaml file I used:

name: ceos-lab
topology:
  nodes:
    ceos1:
      kind: ceos
      image: registry.digitalocean.com/network-analyzer-lab/ceos:4.33.1F
      startup-config: ceos1.cfg

[!NOTE] The Arista cEOS image is a private image. Refer to the Containerlab ceos documentation for instructions on how to access it.

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🔁 Step 2: Convert and Deploy Using Clabverter

Now, let’s turn that topology into Kubernetes-native resources and deploy it:

clabverter --stdout --naming non-prefixed --topologyFile ./ceos.lab.yaml | kubectl apply -f -

⚠️ You might see a platform mismatch warning (e.g., linux/amd64 vs arm64) — it’s safe to ignore if the pod starts successfully.

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✅ Step 3: Verify the Deployment

Make sure everything came up properly:

kubectl get namespaces
kubectl get topology -n c9s-ceos-lab
kubectl get pods -n c9s-ceos-lab -o wide

Here’s what I saw in my lab:

> kubectl get ns

NAME              STATUS   AGE
c9s               Active   2d23h
c9s-ceos-lab      Active   11s
default           Active   3d16h
...

> kubectl get --namespace c9s-ceos-lab topology
NAME       KIND           AGE   READY
ceos-lab   containerlab   43s   true

> kubectl get pods --namespace c9s-ceos-lab -o wide
NAME                     READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE   IP            NODE
ceos1-5dc7cbc78d-rr9qd   1/1     Running   0          10m   10.109.0.28   pool-42jzkx9cx-6s71k

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🛠️ Step 4: Inspect from Inside the Container

Start a shell in the pod:

kubectl exec -it -n c9s-ceos-lab ceos1-XXXXX -- bash

Then inspect the topology:

containerlab inspect

Sample output:

╭───────┬─────────────┬─────────┬────────────────╮
│  Name │ Kind/Image  │  State  │ IPv4/6 Address │
├───────┼─────────────┼─────────┼────────────────┤
│ ceos1 │ ceos        │ running │ 172.20.20.10   │
╰───────┴─────────────┴─────────┴────────────────╯

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🔐 Step 5: SSH Into the cEOS Node

While still inside the container, connect to the actual device:

ssh admin@ceos1

You’ll be prompted for a password — use the default or whatever’s configured in your startup config.

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🔍 Step 6: Check gNMI Status

Inside the cEOS CLI, run:

show management api gnmi

You’ll likely see something like:

Enabled: no transports enabled

Perfect — that means gNMI is not active yet, which gives us a clean slate for the Run phase.

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🧠 What We Accomplished in Walk

• Converted a .lab.yaml topology into Kubernetes-native resources
• Deployed a real Arista cEOS instance inside Kubernetes
• Verified pod and container status with containerlab inspect
• SSH’d into the emulated device
• Confirmed gNMI is currently disabled — ready for the next phase

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🏃 Coming Up: Run

Next up: We’ll enable gNMI on this cEOS node, hook it up to a telemetry collector like gnmic, and start visualizing live network metrics in a dashboard.

Stay tuned — we’re about to see the network breathe 📡📈