Execution
Change via the pipe

In this section we are going to show you the complete integration that you built to push changes in the Ansible data structures that will then push the configuration to the ACI fabric.

From a top level view the diagram to the right shows what you will perform following and would be the standard way of pushing configuration changes into the ACI fabric utilizing this method that is also known as Infrastructure as Code. All changes go through the SCM (GIT) to be evaluated, verified and then pushed into production.

This is software disciplines applied to the network infrastructure.

Note

For the next steps proceed to the Visual Studio Code IDE interface.

Step 1 - Add a network element for ACI

In this step you will add a new EPG into your configuration files that are now part of this GIT repository. In the editor find the file main.yml under the roles/apic/tasks directory and open it by double-clicking on it. We are going to make a simple silly change by adding a new EPG called database2 that will allow us to see the complete flow of changes from the SCM to the ACI fabric. 


- name: Create Database2 EPG
  cisco.aci.aci_epg:
    ap: "POD04_APP"
    bd: "database"
    epg: "database2"
    description: 'POD04 Database2 EPG'
    state: present
    tenant: "{{ tenant }}"

Step 2 - Commit changes and push into GitLab

You now have to commit the changes into the GIT. 


git commit -a -m "Add new EPG"

And now you can run the git push command to push the changes into the repository. 


git push

And this should push these changes into the repository server.

Note

For the next steps proceed to the GitLab web page interface.

Step 3 - Create Merge Request

In the GitLab webpage interface:

You need to click on </> Code menu to select the Merge Requests option which will present you with the screen below.

For which you will click on the New merge request button.

Then the following screen will be presented to you. You will select the develop branch as the source branch and the main as the target branch. Then click on the Compare branches and continue button.

For the title you can enter Add new EPG and then click on the Submit merge request.

And click on Merge to complete.

You can click on the pipeline number to follow the execution

Click on the pipeline link to see the execution of the pipeline.

When you click on deploy it will present the log of the execution of the pipeline.

In the logs of the execution you shoud see that ansible now ran and detected that it needed to make a change in ACI to push the configuration change that was defined in code.

You can see that the TASK shows as changed which means that it did a change in the ACI fabric.

You should see in the log that Ansible did a change for the database2 EPG. 

TASK [apic : Create Database2 EPG] *********************************************
changed: [apic]
PLAY RECAP *********************************************************************
apic                       : ok=10   changed=1    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0