Confused about learning path

[rickgeoorge]

Hi

I am not sure if this is the right place to post this but if not, then please feel free to let me know that.

I have been a system admin and devops for the last 17 years and have been recruited by an organisation for automating their cisco commands. On asking they told me they are using Infobloxx and Cisco ACI. The problem is, when i look at the ACI documentation, there are a lot of things that i do not understand - VxLAN, Fabric, etc. I looked at the basic Cisco R/S CCNA but the subjects covered is not ideal for me to understand ACI. I got a month of free time so can you please suggest me which learning path i should take?

Thanks a lot

Rick 

[rk2018]

Hi Rick,

There is lot of documentation/examples on Cisco website which is exhaustive. Maybe you can explore courses on Udemy to start.

Thanks,

RK

[rickgeoorge]

Well, that is what my initial question was. What courses (in order) do i take inorder to be able to understand ACI?

[rk2018]

Check for the one by Jason Lunde, have demos and easy to understand.

[moatemri]

Check this out.

https://www.biztecharchitects.com/classes

I took courses with them.

[moatemri]

You should be working hand in hand with a 'network' person so that you can focus on your best skills (which is programming from what I understood) and at least get some cross training / mentoring for the networking portion and understand the heavy repetitive tasks that you want to automate.

With that being said, for ACI the Cisco Live on-demand library is your friend (and lookup for ACI or any other subject).

https://www.ciscolive.com/global/on-demand-library/ 

Here's a sample of some of the presentations (they include a PDF and the video)

Your first 7 days of ACI - BRKACI-1001
ACI Troubleshooting - BRKACI-2102
ACI Under the Hood - How Your Configuration is Deployed - BRKACI-3101
Mastering ACI Forwarding Behavior – A day in the life of packet – BRKACI-3545

The first digit in the session code is the complexity level (1 = Beginner, 2 = intermediate, 3 = advanced). So you can pick them in the order you want.

Also Cisco Devnet offers Sandboxes that you can play with (simulator sandboxes but also hardware sandboxes - for which the reservation lead time is literally months). I use them to test my code.

https://developer.cisco.com/docs/sandbox/#!datacenter/all-data-center-sandboxes

Other than that, there's also this community :-)

BTW there's a lot of new concepts in ACI (such as: bridge domains). Some of those concepts will not be covered but the 'traditional' networking books.

Best regards!