Bringing ACI and BIG-IP closer together – one step at a time.

As many of you know, F5 and Cisco have partnered for more than 5 years. Together, our engineering teams have built and published a number of reference architectures that make it faster and easier to consume, integrate and deploy BIG-IP application services in conjunction with Cisco CloudCenter, Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) and Ansible.

We’ve been hearing from many of our customers who are thrilled with our collaboration with Cisco, but they’d really like us to offer a BIG-IP App on the ACI App Center to help accelerate and simplify the process of deploying applications.

Well, we have listened! I’m very happy to announce that we’ve just published a downloadable BIG-IP app called F5 ACI ServiceCenter on the ACI App Center marketplace. In case you’re not already familiar with the ACI App Center, you should go check it out. It’s a user-friendly marketplace with all manner of downloadable apps that can enhance and extend your ACI environment.

Our new app provides a direct, easy, and efficient way for ACI users to consume BIG-IP’s Application Services. Think of it as a new, native integration package that will enhance visibility, enable L2-L3 network connectivity, and empower L4-7 application services between BIG-IP and ACI. It uses BIG-IP’s simple but powerful declarative Automation Toolchain capabilities (such as AS3 and Declarative Onboarding) to enable you to deploy and configure app services much faster in ACI environments. I’m convinced this can help users measurably improve operational efficiencies, reduce time to deployment, and maximize Application Capital. Put simply, serving customer need is what drives us and THIS serves you better.

We at F5 owe special thanks to our friends at Cisco for their guidance in developing and their help in testing the app. This is the kind of collaboration that creates genuine value for our joint customers.

You can go watch a video demo of how it works here and we’ll be demonstrating it at our booth during Cisco Live in a couple weeks in case you’re there. Drop by and say hello!