ACI myth and experience

[Kn1ghtR1d3rOfD00m]

Hello Experts of ACI, 

I'm having a hard time understanding the in depth the behind the scenes about this new tech, so I deciced to ask for people that have experimented and deployed this ACI infra and share with me a brief experience and get me out of the box to understand fully whats about the ACI movement.

Please apologize me if this is not the way I supposed to be doing this, if so, refer me to the right channel or url.

I have been doing a smal research about ACI, they say that cisco is evolving and making a huge evolution in the data center world.

First, we had the tranditional tier 3 model infra (indivual administrators)

Second, we had the Nexus world, with the collapse model where we unify the SAN with the LAN. (effort in knowledge of LAN/DC and SAN admins)

Third, we had the UCS where we put together and in place those techs.(systems and network knowledge I think is requiered)

Now, the trend is the ACI where they mention Aplications and provisioning, and then finally the cloud. 

I know its quite new the ACI model, but is here are my questions:

Can someone give me a real example that when they say provision application and full visibility? 

What type of application is talking about? Intranet sites, and web apps we mostly know we have in our enterprise?

Is that true that if we want to learn ACI, we need to develop skills for programming web apps, applications from scracth?

will be the ACI the future job killer for most system and network admins now that a web developer can simply deploy via GUI from the apps components to the server and network infra requirements?

I'm quite confused since we tradinionally start with the routing and switching curicula, then we move to either security or service provider, finally, or we decide to go to Data Center trends, but then you realize that in order to fully deploy all these pieces together, you have to have concepts of everything, R&S, WAN tech, SP tech, security tech, Data Center tech and finally development techs/

now that I have CCNP R&S and security, I have to start learning programming?

So, does that make sense? I know a lot of people do not like programming, neither start to learn how to develop a web site, since it involves data bases as well, but thats why Im asking you guys, the ones that have experimented this, 

is the myth becoming true?

or am I getting the concept completely wrong? 

how has been your experience with that? have you developed applications from zero and deploying south bound from a 9K? 

how is that? 

Please if someone can give me a slap and make me understand all the nitty gritty behind the scenes, I will really appreciate since Im totally confused with this rapid changes overall, 

Regards, 

[Claudia de Luna · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I've been involved in several ACI deployments for a variety of customers and I've been in networking for over 15 years just to frame where my responses are coming from: 

Visibility

There was alot of confusion about this for many reasons. ACI lets you group together all the *network* and L4-L7 services relating to an applications connectivity. So when you talk about ACI Application visibility you are talking about all the interfaces, endpoints, contracts, lbs, and firewalls etc. that make up the applications connectivity and it reports a "Health Score" for the application connectivity, not the application itself.  Its so much more powerful than the classic "lets monitor the interface that the server is on etc."

What type of applications

In ACI you could define or group an application network profile for WEB APPS that could contain your WEB EPGS and any other grouping of endpoints (APP, DB) and their contracts that define what can talk to what) but again that profile defines the application requirements from the *network* perspective.

Do we need to develop skills for programming web apps, applications from scracth?

Not at all. The "Application" in ACI is to do with the connectivity needs of the application adn not the application itself. Within ACI you can make connectivity available to a web server and run it through a firewall without knowing anything about a web application. Probably good to know that web apps typically communicate on TCP/80 and/or TCP443 :D but thats about it.

Programming

You don't *have to* but.... There is great deal you can do with thinks like Googles Postman but I would strongly recommend looking into programming because it will make your life easier (regarless of ACI).

Job Killer

As to losing your job that is not something I would worry about but if you are worried then looking into programming would again be a good idea. While the goal for some is to offer up a "catalog" based service that say lets me bring up a web server and db that I can connect to (so some networking on the back end) remember that even that still needs network engineers to make those "services" available on the back end.

I hope that got all of your questions and provides some of the information you were looking for!

[Kn1ghtR1d3rOfD00m]

Noted on that Claudia, 

Now I understand what you mean, this is not going to replace system and network admins, but open a broader oportunities in the programming skills at some point for better customer service.

Thank you so much, I;m now more interested in this type of tech since I think even though not all enterprises even if they have the requirements to migrate to this, they are skeptical to move forward because of the young tech as ACI.

Having said that, I think its the near future pointing to cloud services as well. 

I really want to thank you for this and now Im more eager to pursuit a certification in this field.

Regards, 

[Claudia de Luna]

Alex, I too think it opens up a broader set of opportunities for network engineers!

The more we can help our organizations and our clients be quick and location independent while still secure, the more valuable we will be to our organizations.  The server and application teams want to bring up resources quickly, maybe for a quick test, and then tear it down. Bring it up in a cloud environment to test then move into a private cloud as you said above when going to production.  Networks with that flexibility, like ACI, are key components to those solutions.  Good luck as you start getting deeper into this field.  

There are some very good courses on ACI on Udemy.com. Also, look for a series of courses on ACI from Lumos Consulting who made their  Introductory ACI course free on YouTube.