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Cisco ACI Integrates with HashiCorp Consul For Secure and Easier-to-Operate Microservices

The change in how folks are working today means the architectures of business applications and the networks that support them are changing too. The shift from traditional, monolithic app architectures to contemporary, hyperconnected microservices architecture offers accelerated. With it, we have been viewing apps spanning multi-cloud data center conditions increasingly, including on-prem data facilities, to be pinned to an individual environment instead. This generational shift in application architecture and deployment has introduced new challenges for this leaders and practitioners alike. They need to handle dramatic boosts in network visitors while maintaining solid SLAs and expanding features for self-services of both apps and infrastructure. Simultaneously, IT staff need to cope with too little unified presence and insight in to the performance of these technology stack.

At Cisco, we have been working hard to handle these challenges. A proven way is by dealing with HashiCorp, a pioneer in infrastructure software program for modern apps. A fresh integration between Cisco HashiCorp and ACI Consul enables customers to use their intent-based infrastructure efficiently, with insights from HashiCorp Consul service mesh. This integration includes a smart closed-loop collaboration between your service/application and network which will achieve the next goals:

  • It will pave the true way for dynamic, service-driven network infrastructure automation with self-service capabilities for services,
  • It provides end-to-end visibility and insights in to the entire technology stack beginning with the application form services to the physical network, and
  • It shall enable a secure, consistent multi-cloud infrastructure across any workload by shining light in to the nuances of application communications.

Application-Centric is Service-Centric

This integration optimizes application delivery in multi-cloud environments by giving comprehensive service-level visibility over the infrastructure. In the foreseeable future, it shall reduce operational complexities through automation, allowing IT teams to be agile and drive faster business outcomes. Furthermore, the joint solution can truly add modern capabilities to legacy environments without requiring significant re-tooling.

The ACI and Consul integration provides two big benefits:

First, Service visibility and faster Mean-time-to-Resolution (MTTR). The integration offers Abstraction Translation, by mapping service-mesh abstractions to intent-based networking abstractions.

Traditionally, data center operations involve multiple personas, such as for example NetOps, DevOps, Application owners, SecOps, and CloudOps – all employed in silos, resulting in insufficient end-to-end application stack awareness. This complexity is exacerbated by workload (container, VM and bare-metal) sprawl across disparate infrastructure spanning private and public clouds, all of which bring to the table their very own semantics and syntax. A common understanding attained by the abstraction translation simplifies data center operations by enabling faster identification of issues predicated on service health insurance and network data correlation.

Abstraction translation provides real-time visibility into dynamic L4-L7 services also, and service service-to-service and health communication on virtual, container and bare-metal workloads connected by the ACI Multi-cloud network driven by Consul service discovery.

Second, Network Middleware Automation (NMA). This can provide consistent service intention driven network policy automation for virtual, bare-metal and container workloads across public and private clouds for an ACI multi-cloud network.

NMA may also ease transition to a secure Consul-based service mesh deployment for applications teams and DevOps operators with the ACI multi-cloud network.

How to use It

The “Consul Extension for ACI” app can be acquired on the Cisco DC App Center. It offers Service visibility and faster Mean-time-to-Resolution benefits. Network Infrastructure Automation functionality will be put into this app in forseeable future.

This integration augments the prevailing capabilities of Cisco ACI with HashiCorp Terraform make it possible for flexible on-demand resourcing, operational consistency, and a self-service model to displace manual processes for provisioning applications. Customers are quickly embracing the Terraform providers for Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Cisco Multi-Site Orchestrator (MSO) that Cisco and HashiCorp are suffering from together to modernize their infrastructure automation posture. Cisco ACI and HashiCorp Consul combine network and dynamic application services knowledge to provide Network Infrastructure Automation and end-to-end insights.

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