Cisco released a nice toolset based on Terraform to help us automate our fabrics. The mayor benefit of this toolset is that no programming knowledge is required. You don’t even need any Terraform knowledge to get started. It is awesome. I was honored to be able to talk about this solution with Cisco in the Cisco Champion Radio episode about this. That episode can be listened to here:
CCR Automate ACI Deployments with Terraform
ACI is made for automation. There are a lot of blog posts about automating ACI out there, but this is some documentation of my own progress on this matter.
I’m no complete beginner in the field of automation. When I stage an ACI environment for a customer I use several scripts that automate almost 95% of the process for me. However, these scripts are home grown and one of the issues I encounter is the lack of portability to other engineers (as I know the scripts by heart and know which things work and which do not).