Cisco ACI with HashiCorp Terraform

Customers have embraced or are on the path to embrace the DevOps model to accelerate application deployment and achieve higher efficiency in operating their data centers as well as public cloud deployments. This arises from the fact that infrastructure needs to change and respond faster than ever to business needs.

These challenges, along with the ability to interact with “infrastructure” in a programmable way, has made it possible to treat infrastructure as code. The term infrastructure as code, defines a comprehensive automation approach.

This is where HashiCorp Terraform comes in. Terraform is a provisioning tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. Terraform manages both existing, popular services and custom in-house solutions, offering over 100 providers. Terraform can manage low-level components such as compute instances, storage, and networking, as well as high-level components such as DNS entries, SaaS features, etc. All users have to do is describe, in code, the components and resources needed to run a single application or the entire datacenter.

However, the business needs of customers can extend beyond having infrastructure respond faster, they may also require considerations around performance, cost, resiliency and security. This has led to customers adopting multi-cloud architectures. One of the key requirements of multi-cloud architectures is to have network connectivity between application workloads running in different environments. This is where Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) comes in.

Cisco ACI

Cisco ACI allows application requirements to define the network using a common policy-based operational model across the entire ACI-ready infrastructure. This architecture simplifies, automates, optimizes, and accelerates the entire application deployment lifecycle across datacenter, WAN, access, and cloud.

With a vision to address some of the challenges listed above, especially in multi-cloud networking, using Terraform’s plugin based extensibility, Cisco and HashiCorp have worked together to deliver the ACI provider for Terraform.

This integrated solution supports more than 90 resources and datasources, combined, which cover all aspects of bringing up and configuring the ACI infrastructure across on-prem, WAN, access, and cloud. Terraform ACI provider also helps customers optimize network compliance, operations and maintain consistent state across the entire multi-cloud infrastructure. The combined solution also providers customer a path to faster adoption of multi-cloud, automation across their entire infrastructure and support for other ecosystem tools in their environments.

One of the key barriers to entry for network teams to get started with automation is setting up the automation tool and defining the intent of the network through the tool. Terraform addresses these concerns by providing its users a simple workflow to install and get started with.

What You'll Learn

In this webinar and demo presentation, you'll see how to create some configuration intent on Cisco ACI using the Terraform provider, which works for both on-prem and cloud APIC. Cisco ACI Provider supports more than 90+ resources and datasources. A complete list with examples can be found here.