SONiC Live on Nanites

Today we're announcing support for SONiC, an open source NOS gaining significant traction in data center environments. Nanites now handles SONiC alongside Cisco IOS-XE and IOS-XR, enabling easier SONiC adoption with intent-based networking across mixed-vendor environments.

Why SONiC

Operators choose SONiC for hardware disaggregation: run open source software on white-box switches instead of paying for bundled vendor solutions. It started at Microsoft and Azure, and adoption is growing across enterprises and service providers looking to reduce costs and avoid vendor lock-in.

SONiC runs on Linux and splits functionality across three CLI contexts:

• Native SONiC commands for interface and system configuration

• FRRouting vtysh for BGP, OSPF, and other routing protocols

• Linux shell for system state and container management

Knowing which context to use for which query is one of the challenges. "show ip bgp summary" returns nothing on SONiC. You need "sudo vtysh -c 'show bgp summary'" instead.

Nanites handles this automatically. Ask about BGP, it uses vtysh. Ask about interfaces, it uses native CLI. Ask about system health, it drops to Linux. The operator does not need to know the mapping. Even though finding the right syntax manually is not difficult, doing it across dozens of devices during an outage, then correlating output, is.

How it Works

In the demo below, we ask "Is my network healthy?" across a mixed environment: 2 SONiC leaves, 1 IOS-XR router, 1 IOS-XE router.

The system:

• Spawned 4 agents (one per device)

• Determined the right commands for each platform

• Ran 20 commands in parallel

• Correlated the results into a unified health summary

Total time: 2 minutes. Manual equivalent: 30-45 minutes of CLI work and context switching.

Example Queries

Granular questions work best with AI systems. Here are examples that work across the SONiC leaves:

• "Is BGP established between the SONiC leaves?"

• "Show VXLAN tunnel status on SONiC-Leaf-1"

• "Are the SONiC leaves exchanging EVPN routes?"

• "Check interface error counters on both leaves"

Or let the system handle high-level checks and drill down as you continue the conversation.

What's Next

SONiC support covers read operations today. We're working toward configuration validation and eventually remediation with human-in-the-loop approval.

About Nanites

Nanites is a system of specialized AI agents on call 24/7, helping resolve network issues in minutes and making networks easier to operate. We are working with leading companies and organizations to build the world’s first AI network autopilot, and has been a featured speaker at CableLabs and NetworkX, mentioned by Cisco, and was a Top 12 finalist in the 2025 T-Mobile T-Challenge. Nanites is in early access with select design partners. We’re validating reliability, guardrails, and workflows in controlled lab and pilot environments before broader production availability.