Introduction.txt

The Cisco ACI programmability model allows complete programmatic access to the application centric infrastructure. With this access, customers can integrate network deployment into management and monitoring tools and deploy new workloads programmatically.
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ACI Fabric is configured using an abstract policy model on the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC). The APIC has a very rich and complete object model that is accessible through a programmatic REST API. The API accepts and returns HTTP or HTTPS messages that contain JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) or Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents. You can use any programming language to generate the messages and the JSON or XML documents that contain the API methods or managed object (MO) descriptions.
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In addition to standard REST interface, Cisco provides several open source tools/frameworks to automate and program the APIC – ACItoolkit, Cobra (Python), ACIrb (Ruby), Puppet, Ansible etc.
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This section introduces the user to some basic APIC configuration use cases such as Physical domain config, VLAN pool creation and Tenant config.