Why Cisco ACI?

Turnkey Solution

• ACI provides you with a complete package solution in providing network connectivity to containers. This turnkey solution provides the ability to create network elements required for both internal kubernetes network connectivity and also external to internal secure communications.
• The skill gap that exists between the DEVOPS teams that work at the application layer and the network teams that work in packet forwarding and policy enforcement affects day to day operations of complex application orchestrations like Kubernetes. Giving a simple solution that requires little to no training on part of the DEVOPS teams and gives network team visibility provides a better business solution.

Policy enforcement

• Network isolation between namespaces is possible with the integration.
• Control at the network layer between kubernetes services and external services.

Hardware accelerated services

• The integration makes it possible to do load balancing via hardware of advertised kubernetes services to the world. These load balancing services happen both in the hardware of the network and in the compute host itself via OpenVSwitch.
• ACI fabric optimizations of network flows makes it possible to properly prioritize storage traffic in the network to kubernetes PODS that require persistence in storage.

Visibility and troubleshooting

• The integration of ACI with kubernetes provides the network administrator visibility of kubernetes resources directly in the ACI fabric. Network administrators can see kubernetes PODS by namespace, deployment and services directly in the ACI interface.
• All ACI operational tooling can be used to operationalize the kubernetes cluster to give your business an edge over networks that are blind to the applications running over them.