CCIE Mastering Cisco ACI Fundamentals – Industry Trends Driving ACI
THIS POST IS AN EXCERPT FROM THE TRANSCRIPT OF THE NEW CISCO ACI COURSE HERE AT LAMMLE.COM
To fully understand the Application-Centric Infrastructure from Cisco Systems, we need to know how the IT industry is changing as far as the Data Center is concerned. We have reached a point where enterprises overhaul their designs and implement actual Private Clouds.
Why is this happening? Many factors are driving it. Here are just some:
- Application lifecycles are being broken up into much smaller windows
- Applications are becoming less rigidly structured
- Applications are being implemented through virtualization and hypervisors
- Applications are being implemented through containers and microservices
- Data flows in the data center move from North to South flows to East to West flows, as application components communicate with other application components across the virtualized workloads on different server hosts.
- Network equipment must become more flexible to keep up with the fast pace of change and the required integration between new systems and legacy equipment.
Automation and orchestration are more of a goal than ever given the above factors. This is one of the areas where ACI shines.
It allows us to integrate many components and automate processes like never before. It also directly addresses security, as traditional firewall configurations would be almost impossible to keep up with given the rate of change and scope of changes necessitated by the new Data Center technologies.
I hope this video has helped pique your interest. I will be back with more great introductory material for you on ACI before we delve deep into this exciting concept in the videos that follow…
