You can deploy Cisco ACI. (Yes, you.)

#Programmability is amazing. I recently deployed a handful of network-centric Cisco #ACI fabrics using nothing but the REST interface, XML configuration snippets, and Postman. No CLI, no GUI, no console cables. Doing it, I learned a ton. Why do you care? Drumroll......

I published everything you need to do the same thing on github, complete with step-by-step instructions. By following along, you can setup an ACI fabric for best practices, pools, domains, AAEPs, configure L2 and L3 Outs, tenant/EPG/AG, VPC port channels and a handful of VLANs.

No ACI fabric? No problem. Not even a Cisco customer? No problem. No CCO login? No problem. Go to DevNet and reserve an APIC simulator sandbox, download Postman, and go nuts.

The example published on my Github has been adapted for APIC Simulator. In a real ACI environment, it took 22 minutes to fully deploy a spine and leaf architecture from scratch (that could have been modified down to just a couple minutes if all the operations were combined). That deployment included 500 ports across ten pairs of leaf nodes with 180 distinct VPC interfaces.

The Postman scripts are laid out as a roadmap - a "start here, move forward" approach. Feel free to adapt these to your own environment - the methodology is the same no matter how large or small the fabric footprint is.

Remember, using the APIs don't magically teach you what a VLAN is, or what an odd acronym COOP is (and what it does). Conversely, knowing what a Bridge Domain is doesn't teach you how to automate the implementation of hundreds of them. It's trial, error and refining the process to get to the desired state. Hopefully this will leave you with a starting point for your deployments.

Very interested in feedback or if you find this helpful in your day-to-day.