Cisco ACI App Center: Open Platform for Custom Apps

Driven by a foundation of Openness, and extensibility of ACI, Cisco ACI App Center is gaining fast traction with Partners, customers and Developers. Several technology partners have already developed Apps and many more are in the process of on-boarding.

With the Cisco ACI App Center, we have enabled developers, partners and customers to build custom Apps on ACI infrastructure. At Cisco Live Berlin this year, I met several customers and partners with a keen interest in writing custom Apps and leveraging existing eco-system partner Apps, and many envision the App center as a market place for business Apps. I am writing this blog to take the reader on a journey of where the App center is today in terms of maturity, the availability of a wide choice of ecosystem partner and channel partner Apps, and where we are taking it from a roadmap standpoint. My emphasis will be on the ecosystem partner Apps, and before I deep-dive, a quick intro to the basics of ACI App Center.

What is the Cisco ACI App Center

Cisco ACI App Center builds on ACI’s foundation of openness, extensibility and programmability. It gives the ability to build both stateless and stateful applications, leveraging the open APIs, security and built-in redundancy functions.

ACI App Center Architecture

This is perhaps the only sentence I will sound geeky, The ACI App Center is a multi-threaded, distributed Clustered Fabric controller based architecture and supports Containers.

A broad and expanding ACI App Center technology partner ecosystem

I have seen the cisco ACI ecosystem grow meteorically in past three years to a 65+ strong community and several technology alliance partners from this ecosystem have also developed Apps for the ACI App Center. These apps deliver value added functions in areas such as monitoring, troubleshooting, security, cloud automation and orchestration etc. CiscoSplunkConnector, ServiceNowConnector, and InfobloxSync, Algosec ConnectivtiyCompliance, and SevOneACIMonitor Apps were showcased in recent CiscoLive Berlin.

CiscoSplunkConnector App:

The Splunk App enables customers achieve operational efficiency through its pro-active real-time monitoring, analytics, compliance capabilities. Data Center admins get better visibility to enterprise-wide data and correlate with ACI infrastructure, with a single click app download.

ServiceNowConnector App:

ServiceNowConnector App brings full governance, compliance and business service management capabilities to ACI customers. Automation, service awareness and governance features of ServiceNow integration help our ACI customers build very agile and responsive IT operations.

InfobloxSync App:

InfobloxSync App provides ACI customers enhanced security and visibility.

And that is not all. SevOne, a Cisco ACI ecosystem partner, announced support for Cisco ACI App center. The SevOneACIMonitor App allows users to quickly view and assess alert information for all monitored ACI components. Read PR brief here. Also, Algosec, announced a ConnectivityCompliance App for the App Center at cLive Berlin this year. Detailed PR can be found here. For detailed descriptions of the ACI Apps read whitepaper.

Our Motivation and Roadmap: The Cisco ACI App Center takes the concept of an open architecture to a new level by offering Cisco ecosystem partners and third-party developers and Channel Partners an opportunity to build and share applications that run directly on the APIC and extend the benefits Cisco ACI network offers.

We know that our partners and developers and millions of network engineers have a multitude of ideas, and Cisco ACI App Center is intended as a platform for unleashing this potential for the developer community. We want to connect our customers, partners, and developers through one platform and to offer the broadest array of possibilities of what they can do with their Cisco ACI network. To get you started, we would like to share a few related links:

Related Links:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/data-center-virtualization/application-centric-infrastructure/white-paper-c11-738301.html

https://developer.cisco.com/site/aci/

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/data-center-virtualization/application-centric-infrastructure/solution-overview-c22-738078.pdf