The Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is a software-defined networking (SDN) solution that enables you to build a network that is optimized for your application workloads. ACI automates and orchestrates the network so that you can easily provision, configure, and manage your network resources.
The ACI fabric is controlled by the Cisco APIC, which is a centralized controller that provides a single point of management for the ACI fabric. The APIC provides a REST API that can be used to automate the provisioning and configuration of the ACI fabric.
The Cisco ACI fabric can be used to deploy a variety of workloads, including traditional workloads such as web servers and databases, as well as cloud-native workloads such as containers and microservices.
The ACI fabric is also well suited for deploying hybrid cloud applications. Hybrid cloud applications are applications that are deployed across both on-premises and public cloud environments.
The Cisco ACI fabric supports both physical and virtual workloads. Physical workloads can be deployed on bare-metal servers or on servers that are running a hypervisor. Virtual workloads can be deployed on any server that is running a supported hypervisor.
The Cisco ACI fabric can be used to deploy a variety of networking services, such as load balancing, firewall, and VPN. These services can be deployed either on-premises or in the public cloud.
The Cisco ACI fabric is compatible with a variety of industry-standard protocols, such as Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand. The ACI fabric can also be used to connect to other Cisco SDN solutions, such as the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches.
The Cisco ACI fabric is backed by a comprehensive set of SLAs that guarantee high availability and performance of the ACI fabric.
The ACI fabric is also supported by a comprehensive set of documentation and tools that help you to deploy and manage your ACI fabric.
