Policy-Based Redirect
Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) policy-based redirect (PBR) enables provisioning service appliances, such as firewalls or load balancers, as managed or unmanaged nodes without requiring a Layer 4 to Layer 7 package. Typical use cases include provisioning service appliances that can be pooled, tailored to application profiles, scaled easily, and have reduced exposure to service outages. PBR simplifies the deployment of service appliances by enabling the provisioning consumer and provider endpoint groups to be all in the same virtual redirect and forwarding (VRF) instance.
PBR deployment consists of configuring a route redirect policy and a cluster redirect policy, and creating a service graph template that uses the route and cluster redirect policies. After the service graph template is deployed, use the service appliance by enabling endpoint groups to consume the service graph provider endpoint group. This can be further simplified and automated by using vzAny. While performance requirements may dictate provisioning dedicated service appliances, virtual service appliances can also be deployed easily using PBR.