NX-API Overview

On Cisco Nexus devices, command-line interfaces (CLIs) are run only on the device. NX-API improves the accessibility of these CLIs by making them available outside of the switch by using HTTP/HTTPS. You can use this extension to the existing Cisco Nexus CLI system on the Cisco Nexus devices. NX-API supports show commands, configurations and Linux Bash.

NX-API uses HTTP/HTTPS as its transport. CLIs are encoded into the HTTP/HTTPS POST body. The NX-API backend uses the Nginx HTTP server. The Nginx process,and all of its children processes, are under Linux cgroup protection where the CPU and memory usage is capped. If the Nginx resource usage exceeds the cgroup limitations, the Nginx process is restarted and restored.