A few weeks ago at the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) conference, Cisco hosted a session on ACI, Docker, and Group Based Policy for Tech Field Day Extra. ONUG is a two day conference which includes keynotes and panels providing opinions on open infrastructure deployment from IT business leaders.

And for those of you who haven't heard of or seen the Tech Field Day sessions, a quick breakdown: Delegates (bloggers, speakers, podcasters, and influential leaders) come in for a session on Cisco technologies in which they are allowed to ask questions freely throughout the presentation.  Usually these presentations consist of a demo and/or a white boarding session.

For Tech Field Day Extra (#TFDx) at ONUG one of our principal engineers, Lucien Avramov, gave an hour presentation to 11 delegates at New York University.

In his first session Lucien discusses Cisco Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and demonstrates the integration between ACI and OpenStack with F5 and Palo Alto components:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QFz2iqrvvk 

A few questions from delegate Jason Edelman @jedelman8 from Network to Code in that session (time stamps included):

(8:40) Would there have been a way to allow customers to install OVS (Open vSwitch) from source and then just install the OpFlex Agent separately to then manipulate forwarding and policy as necessary?

(21:55) If you have "x" number of tenants in your ACI environment and you have your APGs built out per tenant, would you want to use the same appliance across all tenants?

In the session, Lucien show cased how ACI enables seamless integration and provisioning of virtual machines and services with a Red Hat OpenStack environment, orchestrating ACI. The integration of ACI with OpenStack enables end users of OpenStack to not have to make configuration on the network infrastructure, as it's automated. Second, the integration with F5 and Palo Alto, shows how ACI instantly is capable of configuring these service appliances to deploy within seconds a multi-vendor end to end environment. During the ONUG POC, Lucien also demonstrated the integration with bare-metal servers and multi-hypervisors, adding Microsoft Hyper-V, all in a live 5 minute demo.

Lucien then went on to discuss ACI Group-Based Policy and how it can be used to simplify networking configuration in OpenStack environments:

During that session he explained how the Group-Based Policy Project in OpenStack adds a layer of abstraction and enables end-users of OpenStack to use Policy instead of basic Network Constructs in order to achieve the network configuration in OpenStack. This Group Based Policy open-source project maps policy on par with ACI, making the configuration methodology consistent and easy to monitor and troubleshoot.

He ends the sessions with going over the Cisco ACI Docker integration demonstrating ACI with Docker containers and shows the provisioning of networking for the system:

A question on that session from delegate Drew Conry-Murray @Drew_CM from PacketPushers.net (time stamp included):

(12:15) Are you making the policies in Docker and then is that being communicated to ACI?

Tech Field Day Extra at ONUG was a great success for the delegates and Cisco alike. Tech Field Days are great opportunities for Cisco to share about our technologies but ultimately they are a great success because we get to hear the opinions of folks who use Cisco frequently.

Please feel free to comment, share and connect with us @CiscoEnterprise, Facebook, LinkedIn and the Enterprise Networks Community.

If you would like to view all of the session videos they are now posted on YouTube.