The Cisco® Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) was designed based on open APIs, allowing it to be tightly integrated with cloud orchestration platforms such as OpenStack.

In addition to support for the OpenStack Neutron Modular Layer 2 (ML2) interface, the Cisco APIC supports integration with OpenStack using Group-Based Policy (GBP). GBP was created by OpenStack developers to offer declarative abstractions for achieving scalable, intent-based infrastructure automation within OpenStack. It supports a plug-in architecture that connects its policy API to a broad range of open-source and vendor solutions, including the APIC.

The combined solution, including OpenStack GBP with the GBP APIC driver, offers an end-to-end policy-based infrastructure that exposes the full power of the application-centric policy model supported by Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI™).

For additional information, see Cisco's data sheet.