Author: Kanji Nakano, SONiC Workshop Japan Organizer, SONiC Users Group Japan
On May 16, 2025, SONiC Workshop Japan 2025 was successfully held in Tokyo, Japan. The workshop brought together over 80 onsite attendees and 90–108 online viewers, making it one of the most vibrant SONiC community events in Japan to date. The workshop, fully community-driven and volunteer-organized, highlighted real-world applications of SONiC across public cloud, telecom, and enterprise environments, with a particular focus on AI infrastructure.
Key Technical Highlights
Upstream Contributions:
Kanji Nakano (NTT Network Innovation Center) shared the story of upstreaming contributions merged into the SONiC community over two years, providing insights into the collaborative development process.
Next-Generation Hardware:
Chaocheng Chang (SoftBank Corp.) presented the validation of 800G AEC cables on SONiC, demonstrating SONiC’s readiness for the next generation of high-speed interconnects.
AI Cloud Infrastructure:
Kiyohiro Kurosawa (SAKURA internet Inc.) discussed building and operating public cloud networks for Generative AI using SONiC.
Daisuke Serita (MITSUI KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRY CO., LTD.) shared real-world experience of running multi-tenant services for AI infrastructure with SONiC over the past year. These sessions drew particular attention, underlining SONiC’s growing role in enabling AI workloads at scale.
Deep Technical Sessions:
Kentarou Ebisawa (Arrcus, Inc.) presented on whitebox switch architecture and SONiC fundamentals.
Hitoshi Kuwata (APRESIA Systems Ltd.) provided practical insights into SAI implementation in SONiC.
Taro Sasaki (Macnica, Inc.) showcased an experiment using Generative AI to analyze SONiC source code.
Takashi Inoue (SAKURA internet Inc.) gave a talk titled “Are you using switch BMC?”, sharing operational practices.
Yoshiki Nagao (APRESIA Systems Ltd.) demonstrated how to use the Python tool pygnmi with SONiC gNMI.
Ryohei Aoki (Macnica, Inc.) presented a case study on deploying EVPN multihoming with Broadcom SONiC.
Survey and Community Feedback
The post-event survey reflected strong satisfaction among attendees, highlighting the value of practical case studies and AI-related discussions.
Survey results can be found here. (Slides alternate between Japanese and English)
Conclusion
This year’s workshop once again demonstrated the strength and enthusiasm of the SONiC community in Japan. With real-world case studies on AI infrastructure, high-speed interconnect validation, and deep-dive technical explorations, SONiC is proving itself as a critical open-source platform for next-generation data center and AI workloads.
A big thank you to all speakers, volunteers, and participants who contributed to the success of this community-driven event.
