The Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (Cisco APIC) is the unifying point of automation and management for the Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) fabric. The Cisco APIC provides centralized access to all fabric information, optimizes the application lifecycle for scale and performance, and supports flexible application provisioning across physical and virtual resources.
Designed for automation, programmability, and centralized management, the Cisco APIC itself exposes northbound APIs through XML and JSON. It provides both a command-line interface (CLI) and GUI which utilize the APIs to manage the fabric holistically. The system also provides an open source southbound API which allows third-party network service vendors to implement policy control of supplied devices through the Cisco APIC.
Cisco APIC provides:
Cisco APIC is completely removed from the data path. This means the fabric can still forward traffic even when communication with the Cisco APIC is lost.