This document provides a comprehensive overview of the Cisco ACI CNI Plugin for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. It details the plugin's architecture, design principles, and practical use cases, enabling seamless integration of OpenShift clusters with Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) fabric.
Container technology, exemplified by Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP), offers significant advantages for application development and deployment. However, integrating these dynamic environments with existing enterprise infrastructure presents unique networking and security challenges. The Cisco ACI CNI plugin addresses these by extending ACI's programmable network capabilities to OpenShift workloads, ensuring enterprise-grade security, high performance, and flexible micro-segmentation.
Readers will find in-depth explanations of how the plugin facilitates IP address management, distributed routing and switching, load balancing, and firewalling, all managed through the Cisco APIC. The guide also covers design considerations for various deployment scenarios, including cluster-level, project-level, and application-tier isolation.
This guide is intended for IT professionals, network administrators, and DevOps engineers familiar with Cisco ACI, Kubernetes, and Red Hat OpenShift.
Key Benefits
- Unified networking across OpenShift workloads and the broader ACI fabric.
- Enhanced security through granular segmentation and policy enforcement.
- High-performance, low-latency connectivity for containerized applications.
- Simplified operations and centralized visibility via APIC integration.
- Elimination of egress router bottlenecks.
