Cloud Native Container Networking and ACI

This intensive three day course takes attendees on a journey through the rapidly evolving Cloud Native space, with a detailed look at the powerful new networking technologies enabling this fundamental transformation. The course begins with a look at Cloud Native systems and explores the building blocks which allow organizations to maximize the impact of digital transformations including microservice application architecture, application containers and dynamic container orchestration. The course examines key players in the ecosystem such as Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos, and others as well as the most important organizations and standards such as the CNCF and OCI. Attendees will gain direct experience with the nature of microservices, how they are packaged into containers and how they run and scale in a modern cloud native cluster.

Day two of the course examines the enabling networking technologies that power clusters of containers. In particular we consider the unique and unprecedented challenges containers bring to a network fabric, such as ephemeral containers, rapid container scaling and migration, extreme system density, network attached storage and more. Software defined networking is introduced along with the key container based network interface standards CNI and CNM. Cisco Contiv is used as a demonstration platform and case study, illustrating the features and functions of container based networking at Layers 2, 3 and 4-7.

Day three introduces Cisco Application Centric infrastructure (ACI) and the key container networking enablement features it offers. Policy based networking and stateless device operations are explained in the context of the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) and the related Contiv features. Various container based networking fabrics are considered including solutions leveraging Cisco Application Virtual Switch (AVS) and other technologies. The course concludes with a look at current best practices and future trends in the Cloud Native networking space. Attendees should leave with an in depth understanding of the fundamental shift in networking technologies driven by containers and how modern cloud native systems can be constructed with SDN and ACI driven platforms.