Cisco Secure Automation with RedHat Ansible

This blog is a joint effort featuring Grif Morrell and Chris Palmer of Radware, with Ravi Balakrishnan and Will Zupan from Cisco.

Today’s digital organization is constantly evolving and looking for opportunities to drive operational efficiency and competitive advantage through technology. In this environment, applications drive business growth and define the user experience. Meanwhile, organizations are moving to the cloud for flexibility, enabling the business to scale while allowing their limited resources to focus on business operations rather than on managing the infrastructure.

Cisco ACI and Ansible automation

Cisco^® Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI^®) is a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) framework that enables data center agility and resilience. ACI simplifies, optimizes, and accelerates the application deployment lifecycle. ACI enables automation, which simplifies IT, streamlines infrastructure deployment and governance, allows workloads to be easily moved across a multi-cloud framework, and proactively secures the network.

Red Hat Ansible is an open-source software tool that is used to automate repetitive operational tasks such as configuration management, deployment, and provisioning of network resources in an ACI environment. Ansible is easy to use and a popular DevOps tool for orchestration, automation, configuration, and managing the IT Infrastructure.

Cisco Secure ADC in an ACI environment

Cisco Secure Application Deliver Controller® (ADC) is an industry-leading ADC that continuously monitors and intelligently distributes traffic across multiple servers to ensure availability. Secure ADC plays a critical role in all modern data center deployments – including ACI deployments – by optimizing application delivery, reducing latency, and ensuring a high-quality user experience. Secure ADC allows the same ADC technology to be deployed across private data centers, private clouds, and public cloud environments, reducing cost, and ensuring that application policies are consistent regardless of where applications are deployed.

Accelerating IT Efficiency: The Cisco Secure ADC-ACI Ansible Automation Design Guide

The use of Ansible to automate the deployment and management of ADC instances in an ACI environment not only streamlines and simplifies IT operations, but also ensures that policies are deployed consistently across a multi-cloud environment.

The Cisco Secure ADC-Cisco ACI Ansible Automation Design Guide includes common tasks that can be automated using Ansible when deploying and managing Secure ADC within an ACI fabric, including an example of Day 1 automation for provisioning an ADC service infrastructure.

Automated provisioning of Secure ADC services using Ansible enables rapid application deployment in addition to the horizontal scaling of ADC resources during periods of peak demand. The tasks highlighted in the design guide can be used for initial provisioning, for repeatable and programmatic operational functions, or even as a starting point for reusable workflows to integrate Secure ADC into CI/CD pipelines.

Cisco, your trusted data center partner

Businesses and the technologies that support them are changing rapidly. Cisco is investing to deliver innovation that simplifies data center operations, enhances business resilience, and optimizes application availability and performance. Reach out to your Cisco representative today to learn more about how we can help enable your digital future.

Related information

Cisco Secure ADC At-A-Glance (AAG)

Cisco Secure ADC and ADC Multicloud blog

Secure Data Center: Cisco ACI, Secure Firewall, and Secure ADC Design Guide

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