Application Centric Infrastructure Overview
The Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is an innovative architecture designed around open APIs and open standards to radically simplify, optimize and accelerate the entire application deployment lifecycle. The network policies and logical topologies which have traditionally dictated application design are instead applied based on the application needs. The solution offers a network fabric designed to support the moves to management automation, programmatic policy and dynamic workload anywhere models. The application fabric accomplishes this with a combination of hardware and software tightly coupled to provide advantages not possible in other models.
The three core components of the ACI architecture are:
Application Network Profiles: ACI introduces the concept of an Application Network Profile (ANP). An ANP is a collection of the end-point groups (a logical grouping of similar end-points representing an application tier or set of services that require a similar policy) their connections, and the policies that define those connections. Application Network Profiles provide a convenient, abstract way to model application requirements while implementation of those requirements can be delegated to an ACI-ready infrastructure platform. This allows administrators to act and think in terms of applications rather than core infrastructure building blocks.
APIC Controller: The Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) is the key architectural component that is the unified point of automation and management for the ACI Fabric, policy programming, and health monitoring. APIC is a centralized clustered controller that optimizes performance, supports any application anywhere, and unified operation of physical and virtual. The controller manages and operates a scalable and multi-tenant ACI fabric. It is designed from ground up for programmability and centralized management. The APIC itself exposes a northbound API via XML and JSON, as well as providing both a CLI and GUI which utilize this API to manage the fabric. The system also provides an open source southbound API which allows 3rd party network service vendors to implement policy control of supplied devices through the APIC.
Nexus 9000 Switches: The Nexus 9000 series support both traditional and ACI data center deployments. The switches offer modular and fixed 1/10/40 Gigabit Ethernet configurations that are designed to operate in either NX-OS mode for compatibility and consistency with the current Cisco Nexus switches or in ACI mode to take full advantage of ACI's application policy driven services and infrastructure automation features. This dual function capability provides customer with investment protection and ease of migration to ACI with a software upgrade.
What Problems Does ACI solve?
New user demands and shifting application requirements impose demands on Data Center and Cloud Infrastructure requiring a transformative new approach that is simpler, more agile and application centric. Some of the common challenges today include:
- Infrastructure must become application aware and more agile to support dynamic application instantiation and removal
- Non virtual nature of new applications means the infrastructure must support physical, virtual and cloud integration with full visibility
- Infrastructure independent applications treat the data center as a dynamic shared resource pool
- Scale out models promote more east west traffic and are driving the need for greater network performance and scale
- Multi Cloud models require the infrastructure to be secure and multitenant aware
ACI was purposely designed to help enterprises deal with this new complexity.