Arista's Three AI Fabric Principles vs Pepelnjak's Reality Check
Arista publishes the clearest AI fabric playbook yet — eight-plane topology, MRC, and SRv6 — while Ivan Pepelnjak dissects the AWS flat-network hype and finds the math doesn't add up. Plus: NetBrain ships an MCP server that turns network grounding into a shared tool call, Anthropic's Fable five has a silent restriction nobody told you about, and neutral-atom quantum error correction just hit the right scaling curve.
Welcome to Amaze Networks for Wednesday, June tenth. Remember Monday when we said the AI fabric conversation was shifting from "can Ethernet do it" to "which Ethernet architecture"? Today we have the clearest answer yet — and a brilliant counterpoint from the person most likely to poke holes in it.
Two posts dropped this week that should be read together. Arista published what they're calling three genius ideas for AI fabrics. And Ivan Pepelnjak published a piece titled "Goodbye, Leaf-and-Spine Networks?" — with a question mark that does a lot of work.
Let's start with Arista, because the content is genuinely good. Walk me through the three ideas.
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