Ai-Networking

Doyle had just wrapped his automation-framework talk, and Tyler Conrad was up next. Principal engineer at Arista, Austin, fifteen years split between customer-side and vendor-side.

I went into NFD40 thinking the AI networking pitches were going to be the marketing layer dressed up in new vocabulary, and I came out convinced it’s a different design problem.

This month RFC 10005 quietly became a Proposed Standard.

“We haven’t announced any products yet.

Most “AI-powered observability” pitches you sit through ask you to trust the model.

Dr. Deepak Kakadia got about ninety seconds into his NFD40 talk before he said the thing nobody else on the AI Ops circuit is willing to say out loud. LLMs were invented to model human behavior.

Alex Saroyan had about ninety seconds onstage before he made the architectural claim that the rest of the AI-networking conversation has been ducking.

Thomas Scheibe walked on stage and said the quiet part out loud.

I’ve been building networks for nearly thirty years. I understand leaf-spine fabrics, BGP design, VRF isolation, ECMP, and congestion management.

During Networking Field Day 15 our friends from the Linux Foundation, including Lisa Caywood, briefed us on a recent “acquisition” from Cisco.