Antimony

The current tooling for emulating network topologies at OST relies heavily on an in-house solution called the Lab Topology Builder. While the LTB provides basic functionality, it has limited support for more advanced features and due to its in-house origins is also less likely to be maintained in the future. To combat this, OST decided to switch to an open-source alternative called Containerlab / Clabernetes which is currently being developed by SRL Labs.

The problem with this tooling, though, is that it's purely command-line based and there does not exist a graphical interface to this date. With Antimony, we want to provide an open-source solution to this issue. We aim to combine the existing, configuration-based, workflow with a graphical one which should help people, who are less experienced with Containerlab, to design and deploy their own network topologies with ease. Antimony provides a clean web-based editor which allows for editing of Containerlab / Clabernetes topology files, side-by-side with an interactive visualization of the network. Furthermore, it should serve as a platform to deploy new and manage existing network instances by lab maintainers as well as students.

It is important to note, that this is still a prototype and there is no connecting backend that talks to any Containerlab / Clabernetes software to actually deploy the labs. The backend to Antimony as well as a list of outstanding features are planned to be implemented in a future bachelors project at OST. Currently, Antimony is fully functional as a standalone Containerlab / Clabernetes topology editor.