Cisco Application-Centric Infrastructure Automation Overview

 

Cisco ACI was built with automation in mind from the very beginning. It does not use CLI to configure the switches; switch configurations are pushed to switches from the APIC controller via API calls. APIC controller has North-Facing REST API, which developers can use to automate ACI tasks.

 

The most popular ACI Automation tools as of now are:

 

• Red Hat Ansible. There is the Cisco ACI Galaxy collection, which provides modules for configuring different policies of ACI https://galaxy.ansible.com/cisco/aci
• Hashicorp Terraform. Cisco and HashiCorp have worked together to deliver the ACI Provider for Terraform: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/CiscoDevNet/aci/latest/docs

 

These tools allow developers to abstract from low-level ACI API details and focus on describing ACI policies through already developed Ansible modules or Terraform resources.

 

The modern approach to infrastructure automation is Infrastructure as code (IaC). IaC is the method of defining and provisioning infrastructure using definition files containing code. IaC applies software development methods such as version control, review, testing, and CI/CD to the infrastructure and networking world.

 

The benefits of implementing the IaC approach with ACI are:

 

• Increase the speed of deployments
• Reduce the chance of configuration errors
• Improve configuration consistency
• Enhance visibility and logging of configuration changes

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