Thoughts from the clouds
Sometimes you meet an old friend you haven’t seen for many years, and although both of you might have evolved differently during that time, most often than not you find the common ground and the reasons why you loved each other. Before I get any more sentimental, that is a bit of what I have … Continue reading Cisco ACI and Microsoft Azure
Do you remember when Cisco introduced UCS servers in 2009? One of the attributes of Cisco UCS that contributed to its huge success are service profiles: the possibility of describing the configuration and personlity of a server in a declarative language, and deploying it in multiple pieces of hardware. After a while, Cisco extended that concept … Continue reading If you like Cisco UCS or ACI, you are going to love Azure (Stack)
Imagine you are an IT admin. Your cellular rings while you are drinking your ritual cup of tea in the cafeteria: “why don’t you answer on our Instant Messenger? We have a serious problem in our production environment”. So much for your tea break. Anyhow, back to your desktop, and on to the Incident Management … Continue reading A Recipe for DevOps: APIs + Collaboration + Analytics
Lately I have been involved in quite some conversations, where organisations have shown a lot of interest in the integration between Cisco ACI and F5 BigIP and BigIQ (or should I say iWorkflow?). As you might know, Cisco ACI offers the option to integrate L4-L7 services in the network. What does this mean? Optionally, you … Continue reading What do Cisco ACI, microsegmentation, service insertion, REST and Docker containers have in common?
You might remember my old post on Linux container integration with ACI by using the “network=none” option in the old Docker implementation: http://erjosito.tumblr.com/post/110063660087/cisco-aci-and-linux-containers. In the meantime, the networking concept in Docker has considerably evolved, including in the latest releases the concept of network driver plugins (https://docs.docker.com/engine/extend/plugins_network/). Contiv (https://contiv.io) is one of those plugins, that enhances the … Continue reading Demo with Docker containers and Cisco ACI integration: Contiv
Lately there seems to be a lot of buzz in the press about combining Cisco ACI and VMware NSX to achieve a comprehensive SDN solution. Nothing bad with that, other than it creates some times the perception that NSX and ACI need themselves mutually. And hence this post, since I disagree with this perspective. First … Continue reading Are ACI and NSX complementary solutions?
You might have heard the hype about microsegmentation in the DC, and multiple definitions of this term. Paraphrasing Juan Lage, it is the possibility of setting up policies with end point granularity. In other words, to be able to take any end point in the DC and change its security policies, without having to alter … Continue reading Microsegmentation and APIs: the perfect combination
First of all, Happy New Year! Thanks for looking at my first post in 2016. As you might already know, Cisco ACI is a new concept of network management. In short, it is a network that brings along embedded network management functionality, that sits in a centralised controller cluster. If you want to manage a … Continue reading A command-line REST client for ACI
Hey there, So this is probably my last post of the year, it has been a fun ride! So far I have been able to keep the goal “no post without code” (excluding the news updates), let’s see if I can keep it up next year. But let’s turn to our matter of the day. Have … Continue reading Firewall insertion with ACI
After a long time without blogging, two entries in one day. I wanted to share some ideas about network dashboards and Cisco ACI. If you are managing a “traditional network” (that is, everything that is not called ACI :-), you are probably familiar with non-network folks rolling their eyes when they see you typing CLI commands … Continue reading Network dashboards
Cloudtrooper 