Learning the Cisco Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI) (Udemy.com)

Automation, objects, and policies are replacing traditional networks as we know them. North-to-South or East-to-West traffic flows—do you know the difference between the two? Don't worry if you don't: this course will remedy that! Traditional campus networks are static, and won't change much because they can't scale up. Data centers are not meant to be static.

Today's Data Center architecture requirements are: scalability, geo-redundancy, security, multi-tenancy, and speed! Data center traffic flow should be highly available and predictable. As the demand for talented ACI engineers and architects is rapidly increasing, knowing the foundational aspects of SDN-based architectures and being able to implement and support them are crucial for your career development.

This fast-paced course uses a whiteboard-based approach with hand written explanations. We start with an introduction to fabric data center designs, Spine and Leaf architectures, and ACI. We then start to implement them and deploy a fabric from the ground up. Then we build a multi-tenant environment.

After completing this video training course, you will have gained a solid understanding of how to administer an Application Centric Infrastructure.

About the Author

Rene Cardona is a Network Solutions Architect with over 8 years' experience in core data center and security infrastructure designs, architecture, consulting, and implementations. He has performed many security and data center architecture refreshes for major US corporations in the logistics, retail, healthcare, and education fields, and provided expert insights during datacenter migrations (Campus to VXLAN, ACI, and UCS environments) as well as multi-pod and multifabric architectures. Areas he is more than proficient in range from hyper-converged data center environments, VXLAN, SDN, SD-WAN, and Multi-Datacenter High Availability (MDHA) all the way to network security (firewalls, network admission control, and network security architectures).

He has also performed numerous VXLAN, BGP, EVPN, and ACI deployments for major corporations in various corporate sectors—all with great success! Rene is a CCIEx2 #62050 holding two CCIE's in Data Center and Service Provider track.

Rene is driven by experience. He likes to talk in layman's terms and will make sure you understand the necessary concepts. He does not teach in a bookish way; his training methodology is very straightforward. He authored the following Packt video course: Mastering Palo Alto Networks.