30 Days of ADM: Day 11 October 08, 2022
Application programming interface with Citrix ADM
I am back, it is day 11!
Golly, RESTful API, now that sounds pretty technical!
Okay a promise, I will keep it simple.
I don’t want to just assume that Citrix ADM will be the centre of your world. Of course, Neha is always telling me it could be! Almost every customer already has something that they already use for management or other automation tasks.
What I wanted to offer, is that Citrix ADM can be made to work with other systems. That you get the benefits that ADM offers, but it also integrates.
You have been selected for a training course in Citrix ADM, the goal is to provide you with enough information to be actually dangerous when talking to a customer or client. 30 days is a bit of an arbitrary number, but I am prepared to give you 2 minutes of material, can I get 2 minutes of your time? I have talked about Fleet management, general analytics, security analytics, AI / ML, Stylebooks, Pooled Capacity, instance advisory upgrade, security advisory, autoscaling and onboarding.
Today is all about RESTful API.
Honestly, what are you talking about?
Systems integration typically requires an API. ADM has one, so it will mean that we can tie together systems and offer benefits that you might not have considered.
An API is a set of definitions and protocols for building and integrating application software. It is sometimes referred to as a contract between an information provider and an information user. This establishes the content required from the consumer (the call) and the content required by the producer (the response).
The other term you might see used, that is relevant, is IaC, or Infrastructure as Code.
So what? What problem does it solve?
Let us say that you already have an automation tool, Ansible is your tool of choice. By the way, other tools are available, this is just an example & Ansible just came to mind. Your IT teams use Ansible for EVERYTHING, they love it, and the prospect of having that change for talking to NetScaler is not an option. You know the saying, cold dead fingers..
The API will allow your Ansible experts to still get the benefits of ADM, but do it via Ansible.
Who would be interested in this?
Almost any Enterprise customer that is using NetScaler and has another automation tool(s).
What works with ADM to do this?
Our own Engineering guys put information up on Github , to allow you to use Ansible with ADM and ADC. Here is the link for that one.
https://github.com/citrix/citrix-adc-ansible-modules#list-of-adc-use-cases-supported
What does that solution look like?
I promised to keep it simple, so here is the detailed design layout. In this example, Ansible makes a call to ADM and then sets up a service on the NetScaler, all via Ansible.
Okay, I know what you are thinking. Why not just talk to the NetScaler direct? You could, but you would then miss out on the ADM benefits like Stylebooks.
Ok, what else?
If you need more details, you need Sanyukta! What she doesn’t know about ADM isn’t worth knowing. You can catch her here going over the API in a bit more detail. Push this on to 38minutes to see the part on API's. I tried the 'start at option', but sometimes the platform does not seem to not honor it.
Summary.
Automation is fun! We have tools to save you time and help you get back to high value tasks. The API is a great capability and allows ADM to behave like an API proxy for the NetScaler.
Ultimately, it is another killer feature that is enabled with ADM service.
It is free too.
What’s not to like?