Introduction to Cisco Cloud ACI

In a multicloud environment, Cisco Cloud Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco Cloud ACI) simplifies operations, automates network connectivity, and manages policy consistency. Applications deployed across different cloud environments can be customized by capturing business and user intents and translating them into native policy constructs

With Cisco Cloud ACI, Cisco ACI's successful capabilities in private clouds can be extended to public clouds (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud). Cisco Cloud Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) provides automated connectivity, policy translation, and enhanced visibility of workloads in public clouds. It runs natively on public clouds.

Fig 1.1- Cisco Cloud ACI

Cisco Cloud ACI Architecture

• Cloud Based MSO
• Virtual Form factor of APIC controllers
• Creates cloud native policies based on ACI
  
• Integrated policy management across on-premises and cloud environments
• Deploys cloud resources and infrastructure components
• Application Stretch tenant/VRF across cloud sites ( AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)
• Stretched EPG with Consistent Segmentation over AWS, Azure, Google Cloud
• Shared services and route leaking between cloud providers.
• Automates / Manages Cloud Routers
• REST API North Bound Interface
• Consistent segmentation policy and enforcement within and across cloud sites
• Application stack failover between sites (active/disaster recovery)

Regardless of where your applications or data reside, this solution allows you to extend your on-premises data center into true multicloud architectures, enhancing operational consistency and policy management. 

So simply you can say that Multicloud architectures can be extended from your on-premises data center with this solution, ensuring policy and operational consistency regardless of where your data or applications are stored.

In our next Article, we will discuss on the deployments of APICs, MSO on the cloud which include AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.