Welcome back to another blog in the ACI 101 series. In the video below I’ll be giving an overview on the policy side of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure. Mainly we’ll be concentrating on the Application Profile. The Application Profile, in the context of ACI, refers to how we deploy applications on our network as well as maintain and secure them. We do this through the use of three main concepts: End Point Groups, Contracts, and layer 4-7 services (firewalls, load balancers, etc).
Not only does the Application Profile allow us to understand our applications better, document dependencies, and secure our applications in a way they’ve never been secured before, it also allows us to get away from that segmentation by VLAN concept that we traditionally use in our current networks. VLANs were never meant to provide security, they’re simply a way to prevent overloading our networks and network equipment. EPGs allow us to do this segmentation, while also not being bogged down by IP addresses and VLANs, or really perhaps lack there of, in the case that maybe you used a /24 when first designing your network and now you’re regretting it.
Here’s the overview on ACI Policy. Remember to subscribe to the YouTube channel, and watch Twitter for #ACIMonday every week for a new video. Please feel free to provide feedback or give me suggestions for new videos @Malhoit.