Cisco UCS Programmability

Infrastructure automation, continuous deployment and efficient operations require programmable infrastructure.

Developers want to treat physical infrastructure the way they treat other application services, using processes that automatically provision or change infrastructure resources. Your operations staff needs to provision, configure, and monitor physical and virtual resources. This allows them to automate routine activities and rapidly isolate and resolve problems. Programmable infrastructure naturally facilitates DevOps methodologies which makes development and operations teams more efficient and productive.

The Cisco UCS management framework is completely programmable – it manages infrastructure as code (IaC). Four innovations provide the foundation for IaC in Cisco UCS and Cisco HyperFlex by making the infrastructure programmable:

Software object model

Unified APIs

Virtual Interface Cards (VICs)

Service profiles and templates

The benefits of a unified API

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Unified APIs

The software object model and unified APIs in the Cisco UCS management framework work in conjunction with the Cisco® fabric interconnects and the VICs to facilitate IaC. Unified APIs provide a common control plane to manage IaC. They give you programmatic access to every system component. The APIs also facilitate custom development through Cisco UCS PowerTool Suite for Microsoft Windows PowerShell and a Python software development kit (SDK).

The UCS Director APIs provide access to tasks and workflows that can be used to automate and orchestrate Cisco and third party infrastructure resources. It supports a wide range of servers, storage, network, converged infrastructure and hyperconverged infrastructure. The API gives the application and DevOps developers the complete programmatic access they need.

Figure 1. Overview of Cisco UCS Management Programmability, Object Model and APIs

The infrastructure service policies and templates are created by server, network, storage and other administrators, and they are stored in the Cisco UCS fabric interconnects. The software object model abstracts the hardware and software into programmable tasks. Service profiles allow you to define connectivity, computing, storage, chassis, and firmware settings once and then roll out the components with the same settings every time, with confidence that the settings will stay the same over time.

We’ve developed a new set of Learning Labs to give you experience with the UCS unified APIs and UCS Director APIs. Training modules feature UCS PowerTool Suite, the Python SDK and custom tasks and workflow creations. There’s a learning track for infrastructure developers and a separate track for application developers.

For more information on the Learning Labs

For UCS management, https://learninglabs.cisco.com/tracks/ucs-compute-prog

For UCS Director, https://learninglabs.cisco.com/tracks/ucsd-resource-automation