Cisco and Terraform

Cisco and Terraform
Introduction

Cisco has been an active participant to the community in creating Terraform Provider. These providers allows Cisco customers to develop resources as self-service Infrastructure using code rather than manual provisioning. Some of the benefits of Cisco and Terraform are:

  • Users can provision Infrastructure using the automated workflows

  • Dynamic Infrastructure Provisioning - If a resource is created or deleted in the Terraform configuration, the resource(s) will be reflected in the newly configuration applied

  • Terraform has the concept of the state file where it keeps the record of the resources that have been provisioned. This state file provides a history of the resources which allows the users to keep a detailed audit trail.

Currently Cisco has verified the following Providers:

  • Cisco ASA: Cisco ASA, is a Cisco next generation Firewall. This Terraform Provider has the capability to manage Cisco ASA hardware and Cisco ASAv virtual appliances. The ACI Terraform Provider is located Cisco ASA Provider.

  • Cisco ACI: Application Centric Infrastructure, is Cisco SDN solution that allows a multi-tenant fabric to configure, manage and provide the best in class day 2 operation model in the industry. This Terraform Provider has the capability to interact with the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) to provide the unified operatino for physical, virtual and container environment. Because of the APIC's rich API capability, this implementation allows Terraform to have a comprehensive solution. The ACI Terraform Provider is located Cisco ACI Provider.

  • Cisco MSO: Cisco Multi-Site Orchestrator (MSO) is a software component of the Cisco ACI solution which allows for the provisioning, health monitoring and managing the full lifecycle of the Cisco ACI networking and tenant policies between Private and Public Clouds. The ACI Terraform Provider is located Cisco MSO Provider.

  • Cisco Intersight: Cisco Intersight provides a total solution for the lifecycle of Cisco UCS Manager, CIsco UCS Director and Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC) focusing in Day-0 and Day-1 deployment and configurations. The Cisco Intersight instructions are located Cisco Intersight.