In the first eight chapters of this book, you learned about different technologies that are considered next-generation. No matter what hardware or software you decide to utilize, the physical design will be similar. The main differences will be whether you have physical firewalls, load balancers, or other network function devices in the path.
Going back to the concepts from our introductory chapter, we will review the most important ones.
A leaf-spine network uses the concepts of edge/leaf switches and core/spine switches. A network can be interconnected in a few different ways, including a full mesh, as in a Clos design, or partially meshed, as in a Benes design.
The similarities between designs come from the fact that the physical act of networking has become simplified, with switches and routers able to handle all of the bandwidth requirements of the devices inside the rack. When designing, we focus on the concept of a Point of Delivery...