Author: Bidipta Das, Cisco
Illustration: Aman Chowdhary, Cisco
The adoption of SONiC has reached new heights in recent years, evolving far beyond its initial use among hyperscalers to become the preferred Network Operating System (NOS) for a wide range of datacentre applications.
In India, SONiC is swiftly gaining momentum among engineers. With networking becoming a critical design consideration in the AI era, the SONiC Conclave held on June 5th in Bengaluru, was organized to address the growing interest among network infrastructure stakeholders. This full-day event featured seven engaging sessions and live demonstrations, creating an interactive and highly valuable experience for all attendees.
Cisco’s keynote highlighted the immense opportunities presented by AI-native backbones, the importance of breaking free from proprietary vendor constraints, the democratization of complex networking features like EVPN and VXLAN, and the critical need for a robust execution strategy aligned with innovations in merchant silicon.
A dedicated track on gNMI and SONiC manageability underscored the necessity for seamless network operations. It showcased how IPFabric automation leveraging OpenConfig models can enhance customer experience, emphasized modern device diagnostics opportunities via gNMI, and explored the potential of gRPC APIs and OpenConfig autonomous frameworks for end-to-end network lifecycle management in the AI era. The focus on high-speed telemetry reinforced the importance of simplifying the operational workflows from customers’ perspective.
Presentations on SONiC Virtualization, AI-Augmented SONiC Engineering and Operations with MCP, various scale testing methodologies, and SONiC telemetry at scale sparked insightful discussions about the importance of early scale and stress testing during SONiC development. Finally, the session on Hardware-Assisted Priority Flow Control Watchdog highlighted the critical need to detect, mitigate, and quickly recover from network congestion, ensuring SONiC software remains up to date and leverages the hardware capabilities fully.
Nearly 200 participants attended the conclave in person, including leading industry players such as Microsoft, Google, Marvell Technology, Nexthop AI, UpscaleAI, Nokia, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (Juniper), Keysight Technologies, PalC Networks, Dell Technologies, Aviz Networks, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), among others.
This event was hosted and sponsored by Cisco.
