June 2023

ACI Route Leaking – Shared Services (Network Centric Deployment)

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Cisco ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure) uses route leaking technique to allow routes to be shared between VRFs in the same tenant or in different tenants.

Route leaking reduces routing devices involved in a multiple VRF environment and improve network performance by avoiding traffic to use outside path for inter-VRF communication. But accidental route leaking can happen if manual configuration is used in a scaled environment which may increase the complexity of network operation and troubleshooting.

ACI route leaking is a powerful feature and it’s critical to understand the pros and cons during the design phase to get the most out of it based on the unique requirements of the specific deployment.

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Cisco ACI Contract

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Cisco ACI security architecture is based on allow-list where explicit definition of traffic flow need to be defined. Contract is a foundation for ACI security architecture where communication between EPGs|ESGs is defined. The contract relationship is between ESGs, EPGs (regular or uSig EPGs) or within EPG|ESG for intra-EPG contract.

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Cisco ACI Floating L3Out

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ACI uses L3Out to connect to external L3 domains via routing (dynamic routing protocol or static). There are multiple options and tools to optimize the L3Out for effective L3 communications between ACI and external network services. One of those is Floating L3Out.

Floating L3Out enables engineers to configure L3Out without specifying logical interfaces. Floating L3Out makes configuration, management, and troubleshooting easier. Only specific leaf nodes, called anchor leaf nodes establish routing adjacencies with external routers.

Anchor leaf node – is a leaf node that establish route peering / L3 adjacencies with the external routers. As of Cisco ACI release 6.0(1), the verified scalability number of anchor leaf nodes is 6 per L3Out.

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