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A two-tier campus where distribution and core roles share one redundant aggregation pair. Access dual-homes north; WAN and shared services attach at that pair — there is no separate core tier.

A folded Clos fabric where every leaf connects to every spine, giving equal-cost east-west paths and predictable scale-out without STP-blocked aggregation links.

An L3 Clos underlay with EVPN as the BGP control plane and VXLAN as the NVO data plane — multi-tenant L2/L3 segments, distributed IRB, and scalable MAC/IP learning without STP-stretched VLANs.

Independent POD or DC fabrics interconnected with selective EVPN/VXLAN stitching at interconnect gateways, plus distributed anycast first-hop gateways — without building one giant flat L2 domain.

Vendor banner: Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN only. An enterprise WAN overlay that separates transport underlay (VPN 0) from service VPNs, with centralized OMP control, TLOC-colored tunnels, and BFD-aware path selection — not a claim that every vendor’s SD-WAN behaves identically.

Vendor banner: Cisco Zero Trust Network/Cloud DG + SD-Access / TrustSec. Placement of north–south edge firewalls, east–west inter-VN fusion, and fabric-native SGT microsegmentation — not a Zscaler/ZTNA product catalog.

A comparison of published edge request paths — Cloudflare anycast + Unimog, Fastly PoP/routing docs, Netflix Open Connect BGP-informed steering, and AWS CloudFront delivery — not an invented “generic CDN” topology.

Compare published steering mechanisms: BGP anycast (Cloudflare), AWS Global Accelerator anycast product path, Azure Front Door traffic acceleration, Fastly routing-to-edge docs, and Netflix BGP-informed Open Connect steering — not one universal “global load balancer.”

A multi-stage non-blocking switching fabric topology (often leaf-spine in modern DCs) sized so any leaf can reach any other leaf through the spine stage without a single choke link — subject to planned oversubscription.

The ratio of southbound capacity to northbound (or stage-to-stage) capacity. Higher ratios save cost but can congest under load; CVDs treat targets as business-driven, not universal constants.

The access stage of a Clos fabric that attaches servers or racks. Often called top-of-rack (ToR) in DC designs; role naming varies by vendor paper.

The aggregation stage of a Clos fabric that interconnects leaf switches. Spines typically do not attach endpoints in a classic leaf-spine design.

Ethernet VPN — a BGP-based control plane for advertising MAC/IP reachability, commonly paired with VXLAN data-plane encapsulation in DC fabrics.

Virtual Extensible LAN — UDP-based overlay encapsulation that carries Ethernet frames over an IP underlay, identified by a VNI.

Integrated Routing and Bridging — combining L2 bridging and L3 routing on the same device. EVPN fabrics distinguish asymmetric vs symmetric IRB placement of the L3 gateway.

Advertising the same service address from multiple locations so routing steers clients to a topologically nearby instance. Behavior depends on the routing domain and health signaling — not magic global load balancing by itself.