Cisco ACI and Apprenda PaaS Integration Goes to Production

“No-Ops” for Developers and “No-Dev” for IT Ops

Analysts agree that IT is in the midst of a major transformation. Based on the results of latest Gartner enterprise IT buying behavior survey, the majority of spending is going towards modernizing, functionally expanding or substituting long-standing business and office applications with cloud-based software-as-a-service. According to the June 2016 forecast from Gartner, worldwide spending on enterprise application software will reach $154 billion in 2016, increasing to more than $216 billion in 2020. To make things even more interesting, by 2020, 75% of application purchases supporting digital business will be “build,” not “buy” involving “a combination of application components.”  As a result, these applications will not be deployed and managed from one place – e.g. all cloud native SaaS or all on-prem traditional out-of-the-box.

What would you do if you had the opportunity to redesign your IT department? What if your IT organization could simultaneously provide stability of legacy and agility of innovation? And what if you could do this without worrying about silos between IT operations and software development teams and without doubling the size of your teams?

Now you can achieve these goals!

I am ecstatic to announce the production grade integration of Apprenda PaaS platform and Cisco ACI. The integration allows developers to run their existing N-tier applications and new cloud native applications in a self-service fashion without requiring networking or infrastructure management expertise. In addition, it allows enterprise users to inherently cloud enable legacy Java or .NET application enabling them across data center or multi-cloud and hybrid clouds environments.

Apprenda’s container based PaaS platform integrates with Cisco ACI’s open policy interfaces to free developers and IT operations teams from the manual constraints of network configuration and achieve very high isolation of application tiers, data and network without any dedicated infrastructure. Cisco ACI segments the network based on policy information collected from the application and developer, and Apprenda optimizes placement of workloads based on the same policy information. The mapping of these two policy frameworks constitutes the integration between Apprenda and Cisco ACI.

Here is how typical application deployment workflow now looks like:

Network engineers create blueprint versions of EPGs and contracts

Developer passes application artifacts, including policy metadata, to the Apprenda platform

Apprenda platform sends network policy metadata to Cisco ACI

Cisco ACI controller maps policy to the right EPGs and contracts

Cisco ACI provisions the network

If you want to see how this all comes together, please check out this video

Together, the integrated solution brings the best possible means for application centric enterprises to achieve governance, security, rapid development, reliability with greatly reduced operating and capital expenses. The following are unique benefits for application development and IT operations teams:

Single way to manage diverse workloads, traditional and cloud native

Enable developers while ensuring consistent operations

Simple application governance despite diverse infrastructure

Manage a secure private cloud while leveraging public/hybrid clouds

Execute all of the above without being locked into a single underlying infrastructure

And last but not least, achieve “zero friction” IT through “No-Ops” experience for developers, and “No-Dev” experience for IT operations.

To learn more, please visit:

Solution Brief: Cisco ACI and Apprenda – Build a Secure Application-centric Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Solution Overview: Cisco ACI and Apprenda – Today’s Most Secure and Advanced Enterprise Hybrid Platform-as-a-Service

Video – Technical Demo Video: Cisco ACI and Apprenda Integration – How it works?

Video – Apprenda in Cisco DevNet : How APIs make Cisco solutions programmable?

Cisco ACI

Cisco ACI Eco-system

Cisco ACI micro-site at Apprenda