With the growing number of containerized Network Operating Systems grows the demand to easily run them in the user-defined, versatile lab topologies.

Unfortunately, container orchestration tools like docker-compose are not a good fit for that purpose, as they do not allow a user to easily create connections between the containers which define a topology.

Containerlab provides a CLI for orchestrating and managing container-based networking labs. It starts the containers, builds a virtual wiring between them to create lab topologies of users choice and manages labs lifecycle.