Management plane

The management plane consists primarily of the ANS operator, Web UI, and APIs. You can access the ANS operator through the Web UI or APIs.

The management plane provides the following main functions:

• License management: View or update the ANS software license.

• Package management: Manage files used to deploy and upgrade the ANS service.

• ANS service operations management: Manage multiple ANS services, deploy, uninstall, and perform one-click hot upgrades of the ANS service, associate ACOS (AVE) clusters, and manage the lifecycle of ANS controller virtual machines.

• ANS service monitoring and alerting.

• Distributed firewall management:

  • Manage network and security policies, including deny communication by default, global allowlist, custom security policies (including allow policy and deny policy), and VM quarantine.
  • View active security policies: Display security policy hit counts with email notification support, and provide an interface for downloading policy logs.

Among these, operations management of the ANS service and configuration of micro-segmentation security policies are handled by the ANS operator.