Goodbye ACI?

Cisco ACI was announced in 2013. A switch fabric managed by controllers, it was a radical departure from traditional networking. We have provided code to migrate many clients traditional networks to ACI.

From an automation point of view, ACI makes a refreshing change from parsing CLI. The object model is large and complex, but Cisco provides tools to navigate and, comprehensive documentation to drive the API.

Unfortunately, the GUI is a direct representation of the object model, which does little to help understanding ACI concepts.

Many of our clients performed a "network centric" migration, which mitigates some of the complexity by conflating endpoint groups (EPGs) with VLAN and subnet boundaries. This means one of the benefits of ACI is lost; traffic policy between endpoints without relying on IP addresses. In "application centric" mode, you can use contracts between logically related endpoint groups.

Perhaps it is the complexity, loss of utility from network centric deployments or emergence of EVPN that is leading companies to consider migrating from ACI in the next refresh cycle. That doesn't necessarily mean migrating from Cisco by the way.

If you are considering migration from CIsco ACI, contact us to discuss how we can automatically migrate configuration to your new fabric.