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title: Worth Reading: ACI Terraform Scalability « ipSpace.net blog
description: Noël Boulene encountered significant scalability limits when provisioning VLANs on Cisco ACI using Terraform. The core issue stems from ACI's SDN controller...
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# Worth Reading: ACI Terraform Scalability « ipSpace.net blog

**[ipSpace.net Blog](https://daily.dev/sources/ipspace)** · 1 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Noël Boulene encountered significant scalability limits when provisioning VLANs on Cisco ACI using Terraform. The core issue stems from ACI's SDN controller being unable to replace a tenant's current state with a desired state from a text file, creating problems at scale. The post links to his detailed article and includes community discussion of workarounds, including associating both tagged and untagged physical domains to EPGs to minimize static bindings and keep object creation counts low in automation workflows.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://blog.ipspace.net/2022/05/worth-reading-aci-terraform-scalability>

## Questions this post answers

### What scalability issues occur when provisioning VLANs on Cisco ACI with Terraform?

Cisco ACI's SDN controller cannot replace the current state of a tenant with a desired state from a declarative file, which creates scalability bottlenecks at scale. One documented workaround is associating both a tagged and untagged physical domain to each EPG that needs both interface types in the same VLAN, allowing EPGs and VLANs to be trunked to tagged interfaces without static bindings, keeping object creation counts low.

_Engineers automating ACI rollouts with Terraform track real-world constraint reports like this on daily.dev._

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- [The Terraform scaling problem: When infrastructure-as-code becomes infrastructure-as-complexity](https://daily.dev/posts/the-terraform-scaling-problem-when-infrastructure-as-code-becomes-infrastructure-as-complexity-3inqj2yth) · InfoWorld · 1 upvotes · 0 comments
- [How Enterprise Teams Manage Infrastructure at Scale with Terraform](https://daily.dev/posts/how-enterprise-teams-manage-infrastructure-at-scale-with-terraform-gf0qfoffc) · freeCodeCamp · 1 upvotes · 0 comments

---

Tags: [#networking](https://daily.dev/tags/networking), [#terraform](https://daily.dev/tags/terraform), [#iac](https://daily.dev/tags/iac)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/worth-reading-aci-terraform-scalability-ipspace-net-blog-cimaummjp)

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