HOW TO AUTOMATE CISCO ACI
Victor Mahdal
Manager / Team Lead / Network Cloud DC DevOps Engineer / Solution Architect
CISCO ACI AUTOMATION - USING SCRIPTS
There are many options to program/get information from ACI Fabric, other than using GUI.?Some of the popular ones are:
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For instance a customer need to have 100 tenants that were all similar and each of the tenant was considered a security zone.?For these tenants to talk to each other the requirement was to go through a North Bound Firewall.??The customer built 1 Tenant, and then pulled in the Json config for that Tenant and used variables to populate the fields that would change for the other tenants.?They then pushed the template down to the fabric using postman runner, and within 15 minutes they had 100 Tenants up and ready to go !?I also want to point out that the majority of those 15 minutes were used to actaully modify the templates and the variables.?The actual configuration push took less than a minute.
Ofcourse the next question that comes up is “what if I you a mistake ?” and push it down with automation.?Yes, for sure with automation you can destroy your network as fast as you can build it !
That becomes a quality control issue.?In a production environment you should not allow scripts to push config until they have been checked by another script that checks for validity.?
In the ACI case every configuration is an object and they have properties.???So, whether you configure from GUI/CLI or whatever, at the end of the day you are manipulating these objects.?Even Faults, Health Scores, Audit Logs, Events are objects.??What this gives you is a Fabric that’s ready to be programmed from day 1 of your operations !??ACI even has a python SDK?(also known as the Cobra SDK) that mimics the object model for the APIC.?You can use this SDK to make your ACI Fabric programming even easier.?However, I tend to stay away from the SDK now a days.?That is because as you go to different releases of ACI software there are newer features that come in and then you have to also upgrade the SDK in your programming platform to take advantage of the new features by automation.??The truth is that you can do anything with API calls sent with JSON or XML?encapsulation.
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The object model for ACI is well documented in the?management information?model reference guide . ACI even has a real time object browser (also known as?Visore) that you can access directly from the ACI GUI where you can browse and search for the ACI objects in your fabric and that shows you what API calls are needed for what objects.?
FOR MORE INFO ABOUT CISCO ACI AUTOMATION GO TO>>
https://www.ciscolive.com/c/dam/r/ciscolive/apjc/docs/2019/pdf/BRKACI-2770.pdf