Among the many announcements from Cisco Live in Barcelona was the news that Cisco System Inc. would release Terraform support for application-centric infrastructure, or ACI.

This recent move by Cisco, in concert with HashiCorp Inc., highlighted a continued need for solutions to bring up and configure ACI in a muticloud world. Whether on-premises or in the cloud, ACI Provider for Terraform optimizes network compliance and enables faster adoption of automation tools throughout the infrastructure. It’s all about getting technology closer to the application.

“What really drives this is application refactoring,” said Thomas Scheibe (pictured, left), vice president of product management at Cisco. “Application automation needs to come together with infrastructure automation. That’s one of the reasons why we have this integration with Terraform.”

Scheibe spoke with John Furrier and Stu Miniman, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Barcelona. He was joined by Yousuf Kahn (pictured, right), vice president of technical marketing at Cisco, and they discussed how the company helps customers accelerate application deployment and the continued importance of providing developers with the tools they need. (* Disclosure below.)

Consistent security approach

The integration with Hashicorp’s Terraform was just the latest example of Cisco’s ongoing quest to help customers accelerate application deployment and improve operating efficiency in multicloud environments. In November, network security management firm AlgoSec announced its own integrated solution, which extended Cisco ACI’s policy-based automation to the data center.

“Customers and users are looking to deploy applications faster and manage applications better,” Khan said, “We firmly believe that the plumbing, which is the networking, has to be state of the art for us to abstract these on top of software. With all of the CIOs that we talk to, multicloud is a big part of their strategy, and they want to make sure they have a consistent security posture.”

Cisco’s focus on a programmable, API-based infrastructure also relies on providing developers with the tools to efficiently integrate automation technology, such as Terraform.

“Application developers that want to use tools like Terraform or Jenkins or Ansible or Splunk, all of them expect that they’ll have an API,” Scheibe explained. “What they all prefer to have is something that makes sense from a construct perspective. We had to put something in place to make that work.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live event. (* Disclosure: Cisco DevNet sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE